CVE-2019-12989 — Netscaler Sd-Wan
CRITICALCVE-2019-12989 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.8) SQL Injection vulnerability in citrix netscaler sd-wan. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2022-03-25) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Citrix SD-WAN 10.2.x before 10.2.3 and NetScaler SD-WAN 10.0.x before 10.0.8 allow SQL Injection.
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2022-03-25. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2022-04-15.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2019-12989.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2019-12989 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). In the shaded patch-first corner (EPSS 50%+, CVSS 7.0+).
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 394,415 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the ≥ 90% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
Citrix SD-WAN 10.2.x before 10.2.3 and NetScaler SD-WAN 10.0.x before 10.0.8 allow SQL Injection.
Affected Products
netscaler sd-wancitrixsd-wancitrixResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
Citrix SD-WAN Appliance 10.2.2 - Authentication Bypass / Remote Command Execution
by Chris Lyne · Jul 12, 2019
Detection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every citrix netscaler sd-wan deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Fix
Apply the citrix netscaler sd-wan security patch or hotfix for CVE-2019-12989 on the affected version, following the vendor advisory for your exact build.
Workarounds
Until you can upgrade, make sure every query built from user input uses parameterised statements or a prepared-statement API rather than string concatenation, and reduce the database account's privileges so an injected query cannot read or alter data beyond what the feature needs. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
How to detect CVE-2019-12989
A community-maintained Nuclei template exists for this CVE. You can scan for it directly:
nuclei -id cve-2019-12989 -u https://target- Template
- Citrix SD-WAN and NetScaler SD-WAN - SQL Injection
- Severity
- critical
- Impact
- Successful exploitation may allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute SQL commands on the system, potentially resulting in unauthorized access, data leakage, modification of critical data, or full compromise of the SD-WAN appliance.
- Remediation
- Apply the vendor patch: upgrade Citrix SD-WAN to version 10.2.3 or later, and NetScaler SD-WAN to version 10.0.8 or later as detailed in the official Citrix advisory.
Template by ProjectDiscovery nuclei-templates (ritikchaddha), MIT licensed. View the full template. Scan only systems you are authorised to test.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2019-12989 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.