CVE-2024-20481
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software, Cisco Firepower Threat Defense Software, cisco adaptive_security_appliance_software
Published 23 Oct 2024 · updated 11 Aug 2026 · Analyzed
Exploited in the wild
CISA added this to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 24 Oct 2024, with a remediation deadline of 14 Nov 2024 for US federal agencies.
Required action: Apply mitigations per vendor instructions or discontinue use of the product if mitigations are unavailable.
Description
A vulnerability in the Remote Access VPN (RAVPN) service of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) of the RAVPN service. This vulnerability is due to resource exhaustion. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a large number of VPN authentication requests to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust resources, resulting in a DoS of the RAVPN service on the affected device. Depending on the impact of the attack, a reload of the device may be required to restore the RAVPN service. Services that are not related to VPN are not affected. Cisco Talos discussed these attacks in the blog post Large-scale brute-force activity targeting VPNs, SSH services with commonly used login credentials.