Cisco has launched safety patches to deal with a important safety flaw impacting the Identification Companies Engine (ISE) that, if efficiently exploited, might enable unauthenticated actors to hold out malicious actions on prone programs.
The safety defect, tracked as CVE-2025-20286, carries a CVSS rating of 9.9 out of 10.0. It has been described as a static credential vulnerability.
“A vulnerability in Amazon Internet Companies (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) cloud deployments of Cisco Identification Companies Engine (ISE) might enable an unauthenticated, distant attacker to entry delicate information, execute restricted administrative operations, modify system configurations, or disrupt companies inside the impacted programs,” the corporate mentioned in an advisory.
The networking tools maker, which credited Kentaro Kawane of GMO Cybersecurity for reporting the flaw, famous it is conscious of the existence of a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit. There is no such thing as a proof that it has been maliciously exploited within the wild.
Cisco mentioned the problem stems from the truth that credentials are improperly generated when Cisco ISE is being deployed on cloud platforms, inflicting totally different deployments to share the identical credentials so long as the software program launch and cloud platform are the identical.
Put otherwise, the static credentials are particular to every launch and platform, however will not be legitimate throughout platforms. As the corporate highlights, all situations of Cisco ISE launch 3.1 on AWS may have the identical static credentials.
Nonetheless, credentials which might be legitimate for entry to a launch 3.1 deployment wouldn’t be legitimate to entry a launch 3.2 deployment on the identical platform. Moreover, Launch 3.2 on AWS wouldn’t have the identical credentials as Launch 3.2 on Azure.
Profitable exploitation of the vulnerability might allow an attacker to extract the consumer credentials from the Cisco ISE cloud deployment after which use it to entry Cisco ISE deployed in different cloud environments via unsecured ports.
This might finally enable unauthorized entry to delicate information, execution of restricted administrative operations, modifications to system configurations, or service disruptions. That mentioned, Cisco ISE is barely affected in circumstances the place the Major Administration node is deployed within the cloud. Major Administration nodes which might be on-premises will not be impacted.
The next variations are affected –
- AWS – Cisco ISE 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, and three.4
- Azure – Cisco ISE 3.2, 3.3, and three.4
- OCI – Cisco ISE 3.2, 3.3, and three.4
Whereas there aren’t any workarounds to deal with CVE-2025-20286, Cisco is recommending that customers limit visitors to licensed directors or run the “utility reset-config ise” command to reset consumer passwords to a brand new worth. Nonetheless, it bears noting that operating the command will reset Cisco ISE to the manufacturing unit configuration.