CVE-2024-20481: ASA and FTD Denial-of-Service

What it is

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.

Exploitation

The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is aware of malicious use of the vulnerability that is described in this advisory.

CISA lists this CVE as exploited in the wild since 24 Oct 2024.