CVE-2022-20703
CRITICALCVE-2022-20703 is a critical-severity (CVSS 10) CWE-121 vulnerability. 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 Cisco Small Business RV160, RV260, RV340, and RV345 Series Routers could allow an attacker to do any of the following: Execute arbitrary code Elevate privileges…
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.
- 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-2022-20703.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2022-20703 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 Cisco Small Business RV160, RV260, RV340, and RV345 Series Routers could allow an attacker to do any of the following: Execute arbitrary code Elevate privileges Execute arbitrary commands Bypass authentication and authorization protections Fetch and run unsigned software Cause denial of service (DoS) For more information about these vulnerabilities, see the Details section of this advisory.
Affected Products
rv160 firmwareciscorv160w firmwareciscorv260 firmwareciscorv260p firmwareciscorv260w firmwareciscorv340 firmwareciscoResearch 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
VulnerabilityDetect
Identify every host running the affected component and compare the installed build against the fixed version below — for source-built or distro-packaged software the version string, not a lockfile, is the source of truth (`dpkg -l`, `rpm -q`, or the binary's own `--version`).
Remediation status
No fixed release is recorded for CVE-2022-20703 yet. Track the upstream advisory, and apply the exposure-reduction steps 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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2022-20703 in your dependencies?
Find it across , including transitive dependencies.