CVE-2024-20481 — Adaptive Security Appliance Software
MEDIUMCVE-2024-20481 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.8) Missing Release of Resource after Effective Lifetime vulnerability in cisco adaptive security appliance software. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2024-10-24) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
A vulnerability in the Remote Access VPN (RAVPN) service of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated,…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2024-10-24. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2024-11-14.
- 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-2024-20481.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2024-20481 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 394,415 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the 10–50% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
A vulnerability in the Remote Access VPN (RAVPN) service of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) of the RAVPN service.
This vulnerability is due to resource exhaustion. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a large number of VPN authentication requests to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust resources, resulting in a DoS of the RAVPN service on the affected device. Depending on the impact of the attack, a reload of the device may be required to restore the RAVPN service. Services that are not related to VPN are not affected.
Cisco Talos discussed these attacks in the blog post Large-scale brute-force activity targeting VPNs, SSH services with commonly used login credentials.
Affected Products
adaptive security appliance softwareciscofirepower threat defense softwareciscofirepower threat defense softwareciscoResearch 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 adaptive security appliance software deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Remediation status
No patch has shipped for CVE-2024-20481 yet — track the cisco adaptive security appliance software 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-2024-20481 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.