CVE-2018-0179 — IOS
MEDIUMCVE-2018-0179 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.9) CWE-399 vulnerability in cisco ios. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2022-03-03) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
Multiple vulnerabilities in the Login Enhancements (Login Block) feature of Cisco IOS Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to trigger a reload of an affected system,…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2022-03-03. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2022-03-17.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2018-0179.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2018-0179 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 395,249 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
Multiple vulnerabilities in the Login Enhancements (Login Block) feature of Cisco IOS Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to trigger a reload of an affected system, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. These vulnerabilities affect Cisco devices that are running Cisco IOS Software Release 15.4(2)T, 15.4(3)M, or 15.4(2)CG and later. Cisco Bug IDs: CSCuy32360, CSCuz60599.
Affected Products
iosciscoResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
Detection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every cisco ios deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Remediation status
No patch has shipped for CVE-2018-0179 yet — track the cisco ios advisory for a fixed release and apply the workarounds below in the meantime.
Mitigate without a patch
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2018-0179 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.