CVE-2020-15069 — Xg Firewall Firmware
CRITICALCVE-2020-15069 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.8) CWE-120 vulnerability in sophos xg firewall firmware. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2025-02-06) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Sophos XG Firewall 17.x through v17.5 MR12 allows a Buffer Overflow and remote code execution via the HTTP/S Bookmarks feature for clientless access. Hotfix HF062020.1 was published…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2025-02-06. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2025-02-27.
- 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-2020-15069.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2020-15069 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 10–50% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
Sophos XG Firewall 17.x through v17.5 MR12 allows a Buffer Overflow and remote code execution via the HTTP/S Bookmarks feature for clientless access. Hotfix HF062020.1 was published for all firewalls running v17.x.
Affected Products
xg firewall firmwaresophosDetection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every sophos xg firewall firmware deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Fix
Apply the sophos xg firewall firmware security patch or hotfix for CVE-2020-15069 on the affected version, following the vendor advisory for your exact build.
Workarounds
Constrain what reaches the vulnerable code: limit the size and shape of untrusted input, isolate the affected component in a sandboxed or least-privileged process, and enable the platform's memory-safety mitigations (ASLR, stack protector, hardened allocator) so an out-of-bounds access is more likely to fail closed than to be exploitable. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2020-15069 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.