Cisco admits serious firewall flaw as fallout from Shadow Brokers leak continues
Fortinet also admits that it has been targeted by NSA cyber weapons
Networking outfit Cisco has admitted that its products have been targeted by weaponised malware, which has recently come to light in the Shadow Brokers leak.
The vulnerability exploited by the malware has existed for several years in the firm's Adaptive Security Appliance firewall.
Shadow Brokers is a previously unknown group of cyber criminals that recently made available a large cache of weaponised vulnerabilities in high-profile software.
The vulnerabilities are thought to have been stolen from the US National Security Agency (NSA), which actively seeks security flaws in order to build cyber weapons used to hack corporate and government targets.
Cisco released a warning to its customers recently, admitting that no patch is currently available to address the flaw.
"The vulnerability is due to a buffer overflow in the affected code area. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted SNMP packets to the affected system," Cisco said in a security advisory.
"An exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code and obtain full control of the system or to cause a reload of the affected system. The attacker must know the SNMP community string to exploit this vulnerability."
Cisco added that the company has yet to release a software update to fix the vulnerability, but that a workaround does exist.
Cisco is not the only vendor to find holes in its products as part of the Shadow Brokers data dump. Fortinet was also forced to admit to customers that some of its products are similarly vulnerable.
Fortinet said in a security advisory that the FortiGate firmware before an August 2012 update risks execution control being taken over.
The flaws are originally thought to have come from a hacking collective called Equation Group, which has close ties to the NSA.