CVE-2026-20272
CRITICALCVE-2026-20272 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.8) CWE-74 vulnerability. The records list no fixed version yet; check the vendor advisory below and apply the mitigations in the meantime.
As part of Cisco's ongoing commitment to proactive security and product quality, the Cisco IOS XE Software engineering team has conducted a comprehensive internal security review. This…
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- 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.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2026-20272.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Description
As part of Cisco's ongoing commitment to proactive security and product quality, the Cisco IOS XE Software engineering team has conducted a comprehensive internal security review. This review resulted in software hardening releases that address multiple internally discovered vulnerabilities.
The vulnerabilities tracked by CVE-2026-20272 are related to issues with improper neutralization of special elements that are grouped under the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) Pillar CWE-74.
Affected Products
ios xeciscoDetection & 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
The records we use list no fixed release for CVE-2026-20272. Check the upstream advisory for a patched version, and apply the exposure-reduction steps below in the meantime.
Mitigate without a patch
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-20272 in your dependencies?
Find it across your dependency tree, including transitive dependencies.