On Thursday, Cisco warned of a high-severity, unpatched zero-day in the Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager (tracked as CVE-2026-20245) actively exploited in attacks enabling root privilege escalation.
The zero-day flaw impacts all deployment types, including On-Prem Deployment, Cisco SD-WAN Cloud-Pro, Cisco SD-WAN Cloud (Cisco Managed), and Cisco SD-WAN for Government (FedRAMP).
In a Thursday advisory, Cisco said the issue stems from insufficient validation of user-supplied input, and it can allow local attackers with low privileges to execute arbitrary commands as root.
“An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by uploading a crafted file to the affected system. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to perform command injection attacks on an affected system and elevate their privileges as the root user,” the company explained.
“To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker must have netadmin privileges on the affected system. This would require valid credentials or exploitation of CVE-2026-20182 or CVE-2026-20127. Cisco is not aware of successful exploitation by other methods,” it added. “Cisco is not aware of successful exploitation by other methods. Cisco has observed limited cases where the exploitation of this bug resulted in a configuration change pushed to edge devices.”
Formerly known as SD-WAN vManage, this network management software helps admins monitor and manage up to 6,000 Catalyst SD-WAN devices from a single dashboard.
Cisco’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) became aware of CVE-2026-20245 exploitation in June after Google Cloud cybersecurity subsidiary Mandiant reported the flaw but did not share any details.
However, it shared indicators of compromise (IOCs) warning admins to check their SD-WAN /var/log/scripts.log file for attempts to upload tenant configuration data to vSmart controllers to escalate privileges through legitimate commands, as in the following example:
Apr 15 09:44:57 vmanage vScript: Tenant list upload per vsmart serial number: /usr/bin/vconfd_script_upload_tenant_list.sh -cli path /home/admin/malicious.csv vpn 0
“For help determining if a Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager has been compromised, customers may open a case with the Cisco TAC,” the company added, advising admins first to generate an admin-tech file to help with the review.
Security patches not yet available
Last month, Cisco also tagged a maximum severity Catalyst SD-WAN Controller authentication bypass flaw (CVE-2026-20182) as actively exploited as a zero-day to gain administrative privileges on unpatched devices.
While Cisco has not yet released patches for CVE-2026-20245, it advised customers to upgrade to the software fixed for CVE-2026-20182 on May 14.
In February, Cisco patched another Catalyst SD-WAN Manager information disclosure security flaw (CVE-2026-20133), which CISA flagged as actively exploited in late April, and, two weeks later, warned that two more flaws (CVE-2026-20128 and CVE-2026-20122) were being abused in the wild.
In March, it also addressed and flagged a critical authentication-bypass vulnerability (CVE-2026-20127) that has been exploited in zero-day attacks since at least 2023.
Over the last several years, CISA has tagged 90 Cisco vulnerabilities as abused in the wild, four of them in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager and six others exploited by ransomware operations.
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