October 24, 2024 · Applied Cybernetics Group
CVE-2024-20481 — Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Firepower Threat Defense (FTD)
Cisco ASA and FTD Denial-of-Service Vulnerability
- Added to KEV
2024-10-24- Federal due date
2024-11-14- Vendor
- Cisco
- Product
- Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Firepower Threat Defense (FTD)
- EPSS
- 96.7th percentile (score 0.158, as of
2026-09-16) - NVD CVSS v3.1
- 5.8 (MEDIUM)
- Ransomware use
- Unknown
- Upstream
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-20481
CISA short description
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) contain a missing release of resource after effective lifetime vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) of the RAVPN service.
Required action
Apply mitigations per vendor instructions or discontinue use of the product if mitigations are unavailable.
NVD description
A vulnerability in the Remote Access VPN (RAVPN) service of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) of the RAVPN service. This vulnerability is due to resource exhaustion. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a large number of VPN authentication requests to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to exhaust resources, resulting in a DoS of the RAVPN service on the affected device. Depending on the impact of the attack, a reload of the device may be required to restore the RAVPN service. Services that are not related to VPN are not affected. Cisco Talos discussed these attacks in the blog post Large-scale brute-force activity targeting VPNs, SSH services with commonly used login credentials.