{"id":281142,"date":"2026-06-25T01:46:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T05:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/25\/cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-zero-day-cve-2026-20245-exploited-to-gain-root-access\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T03:40:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T07:40:10","slug":"cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-zero-day-cve-2026-20245-exploited-to-gain-root-access","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/25\/cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-zero-day-cve-2026-20245-exploited-to-gain-root-access\/","title":{"rendered":"Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Zero-Day CVE-2026-20245 Exploited to Gain Root Access"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/06\/cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-zero-day-cve-2026.html\">Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Zero-Day CVE-2026-20245 Exploited to Gain Root Access<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/06\/cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-zero-day-cve-2026.html\">https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/06\/cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-zero-day-cve-2026.html<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-06-25 01:46:00<\/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\">Jun 25, 2026<\/span><\/span><span class=\"p-tags\">Vulnerability \/ Threat Intelligence<\/span><\/p>\n<p>An unknown threat actor exploited a recently disclosed high-severity security flaw impacting Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN as a zero-day at least two months before it was publicly disclosed, according to new findings from Google-owned Mandiant.<\/p>\n<p>The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20245 (CVSS score: 7.8), allows an authenticated, local attacker to execute arbitrary commands with elevated privileges by supplying a crafted file to the affected system by taking advantage of the device&#8217;s insufficient validation of user-supplied input.<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this month, Cisco acknowledged that it became aware of exploitation of this vulnerability, adding that a malicious actor must have netadmin privileges on an affected system to pull off a successful attack.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Throughout the intrusion, to maintain operational security and avoid detection, the threat actor consistently employed anti-forensic techniques, selectively deleting and restoring system configuration files that were modified during their activities,&#8221; Mandiant researchers Chester Sng, Pete Boonyakarn, and Logeswaran Nadarajan said.<\/p>\n<p>The incident, the tech giant&#8217;s incident response and threat intelligence arm added, targeted an unspecified communications service provider to elevate a compromised admin account to full root-level access.<\/p>\n<p>Two distinct periods of unauthorized activity have been detected, one taking place between late 2025 and January 2026 and the other in March 2026. At this stage, it&#8217;s unclear if these two events are connected and the work of the same threat actor.<\/p>\n<p>During the first wave, the victim is said to have experienced unauthorized peering connections that likely exploited one of two authentication bypass flaws in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN controllers (CVE-2026-20127 or CVE-2026-20182). It&#8217;s worth noting that both the security vulnerabilities were undisclosed zero-days at that point.<\/p>\n<p>Then in March 2026, a second wave of rogue peering&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/06\/cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-zero-day-cve-2026.html\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Zero-Day CVE-2026-20245 Exploited to Gain Root Access https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/06\/cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-zero-day-cve-2026.html Publish Date: 2026-06-25 01:46:00&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":281143,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEg3UeGaI_Ej8KFu7-vQHTOuoohYdx04xIdI3W2B6JjCdaTSR6m-y1PAZ-aes-tH9nxtPGO2sFUiu1NwYkwT5s8bDPaHpG8nyN4t_mbZfVjf0nU8L11XujdqERtFUQlMZ85NV_nG6ZhqIQbGdAtyi8p1Oqq7TsBRs1IDn8HvOOnUPFEaL9_2cXrh9eovvaYz\/s1600\/cisco-20245.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[34,27],"class_list":["post-281142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-threat-actor","tag-vulnerability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281142"}],"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=281142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":281144,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281142\/revisions\/281144"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}