Cisco's late April patch party fixes 11 high-impact bugs

Networking giant Cisco has issued a slew of patches for its Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Firepower Threat Defence (FTD) products that address several high-impact vulnerabilities.

Users of Cisco's ASA products should patch them against a privilege escalation bug in the web services interface, which is considered high impact and rated at 8.8 out of 10 on the Common Vulnerabilities Scoring System (CVSS) scale.

The vulnerability could be exploited by sending specially crafted HTTPS message to the web services interface, and obtain privileged access to the device using management tools like Cisco Adaptive Security Device Manager and Security Manager.

Cisco's FTD is also vulnerable to the above bug, but it's considered less severe as it only gives an attacker read access on the software.

ASA and FTD are also getting patched against a denial of service vulnerability in the Clientless SSL VPN portal, and a condition that will stop devices from responding if unauthenticated remote attackers send specially crafted domain name system (DNS) requests to them.

Cisco says it's possible for attackers to send a specially crafted stream of transmission control protocol (TCP) traffic to an FTD proxy, and trigger a denial of service condition.

An attacker could also DoS FTD by sending User Datagram Protocol (UDP) traffic through a vulnerable device at a high rate, if the software is configured to send the data stream to Snort version 2 or 3 for evaluation and blocking rule matching.

The FTD TCP proxy and UDP handling vulnerabilities carry ratings of 8.6 out of 10.

Other high-impact bugs fixed in FTD include an out-of-memory denial of service condition when using the Snort intrusion detection tool, and a web services interface privilege escalation vulnerability.

Cisco's Management Centre software for Firepower should also be patched to handle a high-impact upload security bypass vulnerability that allows remote, authenticated attackers to plant malicious files on systems.

The full list of advisories is here.

Earlier this month, Cisco identified eight products as being vulnerable to the critical Spring4Shell bug, and put another 70 under the lens for investigation.