first published week of: 08/29/2016
With only a small amount of work, ExtraBacon will commandeer new versions of ASA.
Recently released code that exploits Cisco System firewalls and has been linked to the National Security Agency can work against a much larger number of models than many security experts previously thought.
An exploit dubbed ExtraBacon contains code that prevents it from working on newer versions of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA), a line of firewalls that's widely used by corporations, government agencies, and other large organizations. When the exploit encounters 8.4(5) or newer versions of ASA, it returns an error message that prevents it from working. Now researchers say that with a nominal amount of work, they were able to modify ExtraBacon to make it work on a much newer version. While Cisco has said all versions of ASA are affected by the underlying vulnerability in the Simple Network Messaging Protocol, the finding means that ExtraBacon poses a bigger threat than many security experts may have believed. continued…