{"id":246200,"date":"2026-05-14T13:45:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T17:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/14\/cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-controller-auth-bypass-actively-exploited-to-gain-admin-access\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T19:10:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T23:10:08","slug":"cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-controller-auth-bypass-actively-exploited-to-gain-admin-access","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/14\/cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-controller-auth-bypass-actively-exploited-to-gain-admin-access\/","title":{"rendered":"Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller Auth Bypass Actively Exploited to Gain Admin Access"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/05\/cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-controller-auth.html\">Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller Auth Bypass Actively Exploited to Gain Admin Access<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/05\/cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-controller-auth.html\">https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/05\/cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-controller-auth.html<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-05-14 13:45:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"thehackernews.com\">thehackernews.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"p-author\">\ue804<span class=\"author\">Ravie Lakshmanan<\/span>\ue802<span class=\"author\">May 14, 2026<\/span><\/span><span class=\"p-tags\">Vulnerability \/ Network Security<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Cisco has released updates to address a maximum-severity authentication bypass flaw in Catalyst SD-WAN Controller that it said has been exploited in limited attacks.<\/p>\n<p>The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20182, carries a CVSS score of 10.0.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;A vulnerability in the peering authentication in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller, formerly SD-WAN vSmart, and Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, formerly SD-WAN vManage, could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication and obtain administrative privileges on an affected system,&#8221; Cisco said.<\/p>\n<p>The networking equipment major said the flaw stems from a malfunction of the peering authentication mechanism, which an attacker could exploit by sending crafted requests to the affected system.<\/p>\n<p>A successful exploit could permit the attacker to log in to the Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller as an internal, high-privileged, non-root user account, and then weaponize it to access NETCONF and manipulate network configuration for the SD-WAN fabric..<\/p>\n<p>The vulnerability impacts the following deployments &#8211;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>On-Prem Deployment<\/li>\n<li>Cisco SD-WAN Cloud-Pro<\/li>\n<li>Cisco SD-WAN Cloud (Cisco Managed)<\/li>\n<li>Cisco SD-WAN for Government (FedRAMP)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" data-original-height=\"363\" data-original-width=\"847\" src=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEgIp20ybVb0Xx9gAtyhhiXQ0kIVeTUjE8KZQFpnkSzvHO8ol-grJgxJ9UNb_BsUtdpAny8MvUJvmnkeW_atxEqKxVi2ryYGtfOWZXNR5-Qfu1-CajCGqg64Q3ISZvX-IRYn-zB5DtDMeJlyw5bmH0BHfern12V2tjvnL7tzSI7Zqg5pJO9yviEkAx9Qfa3K\/s1600\/attackers.jpg\"\/><\/p>\n<p>According to Rapid7, which discovered CVE-2026-20182, the shortcoming has its echoes in CVE-2026-20127 (CVSS score: 10.0), another critical authentication bypass impacting the same component. The latter is said to have been exploited by a threat actor called UAT-8616 since at least 2023.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This new authentication bypass vulnerability affects the &#8216;vdaemon&#8217; service over DTLS (UDP port 12346), which is the same service that was vulnerable to CVE-2026-20127,&#8221; Rapid7 researchers Jonah Burgess and Stephen Fewer said. &#8220;The new vulnerability is not a patch bypass of CVE-2026-20127. It is a different issue located in a similar part of the &#8216;vdaemon&#8217; networking stack.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>That said, the end result is the same: a remote unauthenticated attacker can abuse&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/05\/cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-controller-auth.html\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller Auth Bypass Actively Exploited to Gain Admin Access https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/05\/cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-controller-auth.html Publish Date:&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":246203,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEh9rok1ToP_K0gWug0GnICltZkvx6bMRyhHfTJG1AcSfrGpM_fOVc61O3Fpyen_IW-wpb4s6Hl3qZcU5nEs77SMWSpKNDR4rrlY2syVVSNEBrpHx8RkWmYaN9MZORNICc8LNhuNjXqqhxmy7JN-y389oyQnAAFoBMJC1NoQSQFaOZ2MnrpKQRfv_eYXIoWI\/s1600\/cisco-exploit.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[31,29,34,27],"class_list":["post-246200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-exploit","tag-network-security","tag-threat-actor","tag-vulnerability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246200"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246200"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":246205,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246200\/revisions\/246205"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/246203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}