As the summer heat intensifies, so does the wave of critical vulnerabilities heating up the cyber threat landscape. Hot on the heels of the disclosure of the CVE-2025-49144 vulnerability in Notepad++, multiple critical flaws in Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) and ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC) have come to light. The newly identified flaws tracked CVE-2025-20281 and CVE-2025-20282 give unauthenticated attackers root access to targeted systems, fanning the flames of risk across enterprise networks.
Vulnerability exploitation remains one of the most dangerous and persistent attack vectors in the modern threat landscape, especially when flaws affect widely used products that large-scale enterprises in multiple industry vectors commonly rely on, including the public sector and critical infrastructure organizations. Threat actors increasingly prioritize exploiting security gaps in popular platforms to gain initial access and establish control over critical systems.
According to the newly released 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) from Verizon, the use of vulnerabilities as an initial access method surged by 34%, now accounting for 20% of all breaches. Complementing these findings, data from Google-owned Mandiant shows that, for the fifth consecutive year, exploitation of vulnerabilities was the most common initial infection vector observed during incident response engagements. In cases where the entry point was identified, 33% of intrusions began with the exploitation of a software vulnerability. These trends underscore the urgency of timely patching, continuous vulnerability management, and proactive detection strategies, particularly for high-value systems that sit at the core of institutional infrastructure.
RCE attacks stemming from unpatched vulnerabilities dramatically raise the stakes for cybersecurity teams. The emergence of critical RCE vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-20281 and CVE-2025-20282) affecting Cisco products could lead to full remote control and system compromise of the target device without requiring authentication or user involvement, which poses a severe risk to global organizations.
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CVE-2025-20281 and CVE-2025-20282 Analysis
Cisco has recently issued a security advisory to warn organizations about two critical unauthenticated RCE vulnerabilities impacting its ISE and ISE-PIC platforms.
The flaws, identified as CVE-2025-20281 and CVE-2025-20282, have been assigned critical scores, with the former reaching 9.8, and the latter the highest possible score of 10.0, indicating maximum severity. CVE-2025-20281 affects ISE and ISE-PIC versions 3.3 and 3.4, while CVE-2025-20282 impacts only the software version 3.4.
CVE-2025-20281 stems from insufficient validation of user input in a publicly exposed API, giving remote, unauthenticated attackers a green light to send a specially crafted request that executes arbitrary OS commands with root privileges. The second flaw is caused by inadequate file validation in an internal API, enabling unauthenticated adversaries to upload and execute arbitrary files in protected system directories, also leading to root-level access. According to the vendor, a successful exploit could allow attackers to store and execute malicious files or elevate privileges to root.
Currently, no workarounds are available. The recommended CVE-2025-20281 and CVE-2025-20282 mitigation measures involve applying the appropriate patches. CVE-2025-20281 is resolved in ISE/ISE-PIC 3.3 Patch 6 and 3.4 Patch 2, while CVE-2025-20282 is fixed in ISE/ISE-PIC 3.4 Patch 2.
Both security issues affect a product commonly used in large enterprises, government networks, universities, and service provider infrastructures, making the risk of remote compromise particularly high, especially given that no authentication or user interaction is required.
Although Cisco has stated that there is no evidence of active exploitation at this time, all users are strongly urged to upgrade to the fixed product versions mentioned above (or newer versions) without delay.As both vulnerabilities impact a product widely used across enterprises, government agencies, universities, and service provider environments, the risk of remote compromise is especially severe. This risk is heightened by the fact that no authentication or user interaction is needed, which requires immediate and highly responsive action from defenders to minimize potential exposure. Rely on SOC Prime’s complete product suite backed by AI, automation, and actionable threat intel to stay ahead of critical threats exploiting known vulnerabilities and reduce the risks of cyber attacks that organizations anticipate most.
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