Cisco Issues Patches for New IOS XR Zero-Day Vulnerability Exploited in the Wild

Cisco on Friday rolled out fixes for a medium-severity vulnerability affecting IOS XR Software that it said has been exploited in real-world attacks.

Tracked as CVE-2022-20821 (CVSS score: 6.5), the issue relates to an open port vulnerability that could be abused by an unauthenticated, remote attacker to connect to a Redis instance and achieve code execution.

"A successful exploit could allow the attacker to write to the Redis in-memory database, write arbitrary files to the container filesystem, and retrieve information about the Redis database," Cisco said in an advisory.

"Given the configuration of the sandboxed container that the Redis instance runs in, a remote attacker would be unable to execute remote code or abuse the integrity of the Cisco IOS XR Software host system."

The flaw, which it said was identified during the resolution of a technical assistance center (TAC) case, impacts Cisco 8000 Series routers running IOS XR Software that has the health check RPM installed and active.

The networking equipment maker also cautioned that it's aware of the attempted exploitation of the zero-day bug earlier this month. "Cisco strongly recommends that customers apply suitable workarounds or upgrade to a fixed software release to remediate this vulnerability," it added.

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