{"id":237181,"date":"2026-05-14T22:24:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T03:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-controller-auth-bypass-actively-exploited-to-gain-admin-access"},"modified":"2026-05-14T22:24:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T03:24:13","slug":"cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-controller-auth-bypass-actively-exploited-to-gain-admin-access","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-controller-auth-bypass-actively-exploited-to-gain-admin-access","title":{"rendered":"Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller Auth Bypass Actively Exploited to Gain Admin Access"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-controller-auth-bypass-actively-exploited-to-gain-admin-access.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>According to Rapid7, which discovered CVE-2026\u201320182, the shortcoming has its echoes in <a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/03\/cisco-confirms-active-exploitation-of.html\">CVE-2026\u201320127<\/a> (CVSS score: 10.0), another critical authentication bypass impacting the same component. The latter is said to have been exploited by a threat actor called UAT-8616 since at least 2023.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis new authentication bypass vulnerability affects the \u2018vdaemon\u2019 service over DTLS (UDP port 12346), which is the same service that was vulnerable to CVE-2026\u201320127,\u201d Rapid7 researchers Jonah Burgess and Stephen Fewer <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rapid7.com\/blog\/post\/ve-cve-2026-20182-critical-authentication-bypass-cisco-catalyst-sd-wan-controller-fixed\/\">said<\/a>. \u201cThe new vulnerability is not a patch bypass of CVE-2026\u201320127. It is a different issue located in a similar part of the \u2018vdaemon\u2019 networking stack.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That said, the end result is the same: a remote unauthenticated attacker can abuse CVE-2026\u201320182 to become an authenticated peer of the target appliance and carry out privileged operations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to Rapid7, which discovered CVE-2026\u201320182, the shortcoming has its echoes in CVE-2026\u201320127 (CVSS score: 10.0), another critical authentication bypass impacting the same component. The latter is said to have been exploited by a threat actor called UAT-8616 since at least 2023. \u201cThis new authentication bypass vulnerability affects the \u2018vdaemon\u2019 service over DTLS (UDP port [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1492],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}