CISA “Must Patch” List Updation

The U.S. CISA has updated its catalog of “known exploited vulnerabilities” and set deadlines for federal agencies to apply fixes for security defects in software made by Qualcomm, Mikrotik, Zoho and the Apache Software Foundation.

Citing evidence of active exploitation against five specific vulnerabilities, the CISA warned that further delays in applying available fixes “pose significant risk to the federal enterprise.”

The new CVE additions:

• CVE-2020-11261 — Qualcomm Multiple Chipsets Improper Input Validation Vulnerability | Fix by 06/01/2022
• CVE-2018-14847 — MikroTik Router OS Directory Traversal Vulnerability | Fix by 06/01/2022
• CVE-2021-37415 — Zoho ManageEngine ServiceDesk Authentication Bypass Vulnerability | Fix by 12/15/2021
• CVE-2021-40438 — Apache HTTP Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) | Fix by 12/15/2021
• CVE-2021-44077 — Zoho ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus Remote Code Execution | Fix by 12/15/2021

The agency also mandated urgent attention be paid to a “high-risk” Apache HTTP server bug that exposes businesses to SSRF (Server-Side Request Forgery) attacks. Malicious exploitation of this flaw has already been publicly documented and CISA has set a December 15 deadline for agencies to mitigate this bug.

The first is a memory corruption vulnerability affecting a long list of Qualcomm chipsets, including ones used by Google’s flagship Android operating system.  Google has publicly warned that the Qualcomm vulnerability was used in “limited, targeted exploitation.”

The fifth CVE addition to the list affects Mikrotik routers and allows unauthenticated remote attackers to read arbitrary files and remote authenticated attackers to write arbitrary files due to a directory traversal vulnerability in the WinBox interface.

The CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog is part of a government binding directive aimed at reducing attack surfaces and risk associated with flaws under active exploitation. The criteria for a flaw to be added to the list includes reliable evidence of exploitation in the wild, the availability of patches or mitigations, and the existence of a CVE identifier.