Cisco CS-MARS Undocumented Root Account Vulnerability
A vulnerability has been reported in Cisco Security Monitoring, Analysis and Response System (CS-MARS), which can be exploited by malicious, local users to gain escalated privileges.
The vulnerability is caused due to CS-MARS appliances being shipped with a default password for an undocumented administrative root account that is intended for debugging purposes. This can be exploited by malicious users to gain root privileges using the undocumented “expert” command. The password for the account reportedly cannot be changed.
Successful exploitation requires logon to the administration command line interface with e.g. the “pnadmin” account.
The vulnerability has been reported in versions prior to 4.1.3.
Please upgrade to 4.1.3 asap.
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