A critical vulnerability in Cisco’s Identity Services Engine (ISE) enables unauthenticated remote attackers to retrieve sensitive information and perform administrative actions across various cloud environments upon exploitation. With a PoC code exploit now publicly accessible, the flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-20286, poses a serious threat to global organizations that take advantage of the corresponding Cisco product when deployed on popular cloud platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
The cybersecurity landscape continues to evolve, showing a rising trend in critical CVEs, zero-day vulnerabilities, and an increasing number of in-the-wild attacks targeting high-impact flaws. As of June 2025, more than 20,000 vulnerabilities were disclosed, representing a 16% rise compared to the same period in the previous year and highlighting the need for increased cyber vigilance to outscale cyber threats.
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CVE-2025-20286 Analysis
Cisco has recently issued security updates to fix a critical ISE vulnerability that could facilitate malicious operations on affected systems when weaponized by adversaries. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2025-20286 and assigned a CVSS score of 9.9 out of 10, is classified as a static credential flaw.
The vulnerability impacts cloud deployments of ISE on AWS, Azure, and OCI, giving unauthenticated remote attackers the green light to access sensitive data, perform limited administrative actions, alter system settings, or disrupt services. While a PoC exploit exists, Cisco states there is no indication of active exploitation in the wild.
The root cause lies in improperly generated static credentials during cloud deployments of Cisco ISE. These credentials are identical across all deployments that share the same software release and cloud platform, leading to a situation where, for example, all instances of ISE version 3.1 on AWS use the same credentials. However, these static credentials are not interchangeable across different versions or cloud platforms. For instance, credentials for version 3.1 on AWS would not work on version 3.2, and credentials for version 3.2 on AWS would differ from those used on Azure.
Upon successful exploitation, CVE-2025-20286 could allow adversaries to extract user credentials from a Cisco ISE instance deployed in the cloud and use them to gain access to other ISE deployments across different cloud environments via unsecured ports. However, Cisco emphasizes that the issue only affects deployments where the Primary Administration Node is hosted in the cloud, while on-prem ones are not impacted.
More specifically, the flaw does not impact on-premises deployments (any form factor installed via ISO or OVA), or cloud deployments on Azure VMware Solution, Google Cloud VMware Engine, or VMware Cloud on AWS. It also excludes hybrid setups where all administrative nodes are on-premises. Affected versions include Cisco ISE versions 3.1 through 3.4 on AWS, and ISE versions 3.2 through 3.4 on Azure and OCI.
While there is no direct workaround for this flaw, Cisco recommends a set of feasible CVE-2025-20286 mitigation measures to minimize the risks of exploitation, including restricting access using Cloud Security Groups, maintaining IP-based access control in Cisco ISE, and resetting credentials on fresh installs. The vendor has released a hot fix (ise-apply-CSCwn63400_3.1.x_patchall-SPA.tar.gz) applicable to ISE versions 3.1 through 3.4, addressing the vulnerability until fixed versions are available. Customers using versions 3.3 and 3.4 should upgrade to 3.3P8 or 3.4P3, respectively. A full fix for version 3.5 is planned for release in August 2025.
Due to the risks of CVE-2025-20286 exploitation and its potentially severe impact, Cisco ISE users should treat this flaw as a critical security concern and address it without delay. To help security teams proactively defend against emerging threats and safeguard organizations against vulnerability exploitation attempts, SOC Prime Platform offers a complete product suite backed by AI, automation, and real-time threat intel for building a more robust cybersecurity posture.
The post CVE-2025-20286 Vulnerability Exploitation: Critical Cisco ISE Flaw Affects AWS, Microsoft Azure, and OCI Cloud Deployments appeared first on SOC Prime.
