CVE-2022-0028 — PAN-OS
HIGHCVE-2022-0028 is a high-severity (CVSS 8.6) CWE-406 vulnerability in paloaltonetworks pan-os. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2022-08-22) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
A PAN-OS URL filtering policy misconfiguration could allow a network-based attacker to conduct reflected and amplified TCP denial-of-service (RDoS) attacks. The DoS attack would appear…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2022-08-22. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2022-09-12.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2022-0028.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2022-0028 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 394,803 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
A PAN-OS URL filtering policy misconfiguration could allow a network-based attacker to conduct reflected and amplified TCP denial-of-service (RDoS) attacks. The DoS attack would appear to originate from a Palo Alto Networks PA-Series (hardware), VM-Series (virtual) and CN-Series (container) firewall against an attacker-specified target. To be misused by an external attacker, the firewall configuration must have a URL filtering profile with one or more blocked categories assigned to a source zone that has an external facing interface. This configuration is not typical for URL filtering and, if set, is likely unintended by the administrator. If exploited, this issue would not impact the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of our products. However, the resulting denial-of-service (DoS) attack may help obfuscate the identity of the attacker and implicate the firewall as the source of the attack. We have taken prompt action to address this issue in our PAN-OS software. All software updates for this issue are expected to be released no later than the week of August 15, 2022. This issue does not impact Panorama M-Series or Panorama virtual appliances. This issue has been resolved for all Cloud NGFW and Prisma Access customers and no additional action is required from them.
Affected Products
pan-ospaloaltonetworksResearch 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 paloaltonetworks pan-os deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Remediation status
No patch has shipped for CVE-2022-0028 yet — track the paloaltonetworks pan-os 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-2022-0028 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.