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HPE Issues Critical Security Patches

by VARINDIA 2024-11-12

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has released security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities impacting Aruba Networking Access Point products, including two critical bugs that could result in unauthenticated command execution. These security flaws, if left unpatched, could be exploited by attackers to gain unauthorized access to networks, potentially leading to data breaches or disruptions.

The vulnerabilities, affecting Aruba’s WLAN and Wi-Fi infrastructure, have raised concerns across enterprises and institutions relying on these access points for secure wireless connectivity. The most severe among the six newly patched vulnerabilities are CVE-2024-42509 (CVSS score: 9.8) and CVE-2024-47460 (CVSS score: 9.0), two critical unauthenticated command injection flaws in the CLI Service that could result in the execution of arbitrary code.

Issuing an advisory, HPE said, "Command injection vulnerability in the underlying CLI service could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution by sending specially crafted packets destined to the PAPI (Aruba's Access Point management protocol) UDP port (8211)."

The patches are part of HPE’s ongoing efforts to ensure robust security for its networking solutions. Organizations using Aruba products are advised to implement these patches promptly to mitigate potential risks. The vulnerabilities underscore the importance of keeping network hardware and software up to date, particularly as attackers increasingly target infrastructure within corporate and public networks.

Although Aruba Network access points have not previously been reported as exploited in the wild, they are an attractive target for threat actors due to the potential access these vulnerabilities could provide through privileged user RCE. It's advised to enable cluster security via the cluster-security command to mitigate CVE-2024-42509 and CVE-2024-47460 on devices running Instant AOS-8 code. However, for AOS-10 devices, the company recommends blocking access to UDP port 8211 from all untrusted networks.