Cisco Shits Out 48 Firewall Holes, Two of Them Actually Matter

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Just when you thought your weekend was going to be quiet—maybe a bit of light drinking to forget the existential horror of your users—Cisco decides to drop a steaming deuce of biblical proportions on the security community. Forty-eight. Fucking. Vulnerabilities. In their so-called “Secure” Firewall line. I shit you not, they actually put the word “Secure” in the product name, which in Cisco’s native tongue apparently translates to “Swiss Cheese Doused in Petrol.”

Let’s cut through the marketing wank and look at the two critical turds floating in the punchbowl, shall we?

First up, we’ve got CVE-2024-20412—a beautiful authentication bypass in the SSL VPN that uses SAML. Because nothing screams “enterprise-grade security” like letting any random bastard waltz straight into your VPN session without so much as a by-your-leave. CVSS 10.0. A perfect fucking score. An unauthenticated attacker can just… become an existing user. Like some kind of digital hermit crab, squatting in your legitimate user’s shell while they have dinner with their family. The fix? Patch your shit, disable SAML (which breaks everything), or migrate to AnyConnect. Translation: You’re fucked either way, but at least Cisco gets to blame your “configuration choices.”

Then there’s CVE-2024-20424—a command injection vulnerability in the web management interface. CVSS 9.9, because apparently, nothing is perfect. If you’re an authenticated administrator (and let’s face it, your admin password is probably “Summer2024!” written on a Post-it), you can inject arbitrary commands as root. Why? Because input sanitization is apparently a concept that Cisco’s codebase treats like a personal insult. It’s 2024, and we’re still dealing with command injection? What the shit are they teaching these developers? How to code with their elbows?

The other 46 vulnerabilities are your standard-issue buffet of incompetence: DoS conditions that’ll make your firewall shit itself during a light breeze, XSS for the phishing enthusiasts, information disclosure for the nosy parkers, and local privilege escalation because apparently, the firewall doesn’t trust itself either. Affected models include basically everything with “Firepower” in the name—1000, 2100, 3100, 4200 series, and the virtual ones too. If it runs Firepower Threat Defense, it’s currently about as secure as a paper condom.

Patches are “available”—which means you’ll spend the next three weekends in change-control hell while management asks why the VPN is down and you have to explain that “security” is actually part of your job description, not just a checkbox on a PowerPoint slide. There are workarounds for some of them, like “don’t use SAML” or “don’t use the web interface,” which is the equivalent of fixing a flat tire by setting the car on fire.

You can read the full gory details here, not that it’ll make you feel any better: https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities-threats/cisco-48-firewall-vulnerabilities-2-critical

This reminds me of the time I had to maintain a Cisco PIX firewall back in the dark ages. Some sales drone calls up screaming that his “mission-critical” VPN access to Facebook—I mean, the “client portal”—is down because I’m pushing an emergency patch. I explain that the alternative is his credentials being auctioned off on a Russian forum for the price of a used toothbrush. He whines about SLA agreements. I accidentally-on-purpose trip over the power cable, “forget” which rack it’s in for three hours, and use the downtime to replace the firmware with a brick. Sometimes the only way to secure a network is to ensure there’s no network. The users survived. The firewall didn’t. I consider it a mercy killing.

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