Cisco ASA and FTD Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
What it is
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) contain a privilege escalation vulnerability that can allow local privilege escalation from Administrator to root.
Who's affected
Affects anyone with Cisco networking or security appliances on their network — typically a firewall, switch, or remote-access VPN. That device controls traffic to and from every workstation; exploitation can mean an attacker pivots inside the network without touching any user device.
What to do
Apply mitigations per vendor instructions or discontinue use of the product if mitigations are unavailable.
CISA action deadline: May 1, 2024. Federal agencies must complete the required action by this date. For private SMBs the deadline is advisory — but treat it as a strong recommendation, especially if you handle regulated data (HIPAA, GLBA, ABA model rules).
If you don't have someone in-house to verify the patch deployed across every endpoint — or you're not sure whether you're affected — that's exactly the kind of triage we do. Book a free 20-minute triage call.
Severity
CVSS base score: 6.0 — MEDIUM
Weakness classification: CWE-94
Source
Pulled daily from the public cisagov/kev-data mirror (CC0). View the original entry on cisa.gov. CISA KEV is US-Government public-domain data; we add the SMB-vertical framing and the coping action above.