Cisco has recently rolled out patches for multiple vulnerabilities affecting the Jabber web conferencing platform. Exploiting these vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to gain access to the target systems and run programs.
Cisco Jabber Vulnerabilities Could Allow Remote Attacks
Researchers from the Watchcom Security Group found multiple vulnerabilities affecting Cisco’s video conferencing app Jabber.
As disclosed, they found multiple vulnerabilities affecting the platform, which also included a critical flaw. Exploiting this critical bug could simply allow an attacker to execute codes on the target device. All an attacker had to do was to send a maliciously crafted message to the target users. The attack would work for both the individual chats as well as group chats.
Explaining further, the researchers elaborated that the exploit required no user interaction. It would work even with the app running in the background.
While the researchers discovered the bugs back in September, the flaws could receive complete fixes only recently, according to Watchcom.
In the following video, the researchers have demonstrated the attack.
In their advisory, Cisco has credited the researchers for reporting three bugs, CVE-2020-26085, CVE-2020-27132, and CVE-2020-27127.
Among these, the bug CVE-2020-26085 was the one explained above. This vulnerability achieved a critical severity rating with a CVSS score of 9.9. It affected Cisco Jabber for Windows and macOS. Describing it, Cisco stated,
The vulnerability is due to improper validation of message contents. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending specially crafted XMPP messages to the affected software.
Whereas the other two, CVE-2020-27132 and CVE-2020-27127, were medium severity bugs, the latter affecting the Windows version only.
Two More Jabber Bugs Also Fixed
In addition to the three bugs that Watchcom discovered, Cisco also found two more vulnerabilities during internal testing.
These vulnerabilities, CVE-2020-27133 and CVE-2020-27134, achieved high severity ratings with CVSS scores of 8.8 and 8.0 respectively. These bugs, upon exploitation, could also allow executing arbitrary commands on the target systems.
While CVE-2020-27133 affected the Windows version only, CVE-2020-27134 (script injection vulnerability) also affected Jabber for macOS and mobile platforms too.
Therefore, all Cisco Jabber should ensure updating their devices with the latest versions to receive the patches.