June 26, 2025 by Anil Shetty netscaler.com
Over the past two weeks, Cloud Software Group has released builds to address CVE-2025-6543 and CVE 2025-5777, which affect NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway if they are configured as a Gateway (VPN virtual server, ICA Proxy, CVPN, RDP Proxy) OR an Authentication Authorization and Auditing (“AAA”) virtual server. While both of the vulnerabilities involve the same modules, the exposures differ. CVE 2025-6543, if exploited, could lead to a memory overflow vulnerability, resulting in unintended control flow and Denial of Service. CVE 2025-5777 arises from insufficient input validation that leads to memory overread.
Some commentators have drawn comparisons between CVE 2025-5777 and CVE 2023-4966. While the vulnerabilities share some characteristics, Cloud Software Group has found no evidence to indicate that they are related.
The description of the vulnerability on the NIST website for CVE-2025-5777 initially erroneously identified NetScaler Management Interface as implicated in the vulnerability, but they subsequently updated the description to exclude it. The most accurate description of CVE 2025-5777 can be found in the Citrix security bulletin published on June 17, 2025.
Through our internal review process and by collaborating with customers, we identified the affected NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway builds. CVE 2025-5777 only applies to customer-managed NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway. Cloud Software Group upgrades Citrix-managed cloud services and Citrix-managed Adaptive Authentication with the necessary software updates. Please refer to the security bulletin for more details.
Citrix has signed CISA’s Secure by Design pledge, reinforcing our commitment to building security into every stage of the product lifecycle. As part of this pledge, we prioritize security by default, transparency, and accountability in how we manage vulnerabilities. Our Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) follows industry standards to assess, address, and disclose vulnerabilities responsibly. We work closely with security researchers, government agencies and customers to ensure timely fixes and clear communication. Learn more about our responsible disclosure process at Citrix Vulnerability Response.
Additionally, there’s an issue related to authentication that you may observe after upgrading NetScaler to build 14.1 47.46 or 13.1 59.19. This can manifest as a “broken” login page, especially when using authentication methods like DUO configurations based on Radius authentication, SAML, or any Identity Provider (IDP) that relies on custom scripts. This behavior can be attributed to the Content Security Policy (CSP) header being enabled by default in this NetScaler build, especially when CSP was not enabled prior to the upgrade. For more information on this issue please refer to the KB article.
The Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) has discovered two linked local privilege escalation (LPE) flaws.
The first (CVE-2025-6018) resides in the PAM configuration of openSUSE Leap 15 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 15. Using this vulnerability, an unprivileged local attacker—for example, via SSH—can elevate to the “allow_active” user and invoke polkit actions normally reserved for a physically present user.
The second (CVE-2025-6019) affects libblockdev, is exploitable via the udisks daemon included by default on most Linux distributions, and allows an “allow_active” user to gain full root privileges. Although CVE-2025-6019 on its own requires existing allow_active context, chaining it with CVE-2025-6018 enables a purely unprivileged attacker to achieve full root access.
This libblockdev/udisks flaw is extremely significant. Although it nominally requires “allow_active” privileges, udisks ships by default on almost all Linux distributions, so nearly any system is vulnerable. Techniques to gain “allow_active”, including the PAM issue disclosed here, further negate that barrier. An attacker can chain these vulnerabilities for immediate root compromise with minimal effort. Given the ubiquity of udisks and the simplicity of the exploit, organizations must treat this as a critical, universal risk and deploy patches without delay.
The Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) has developed proof-of-concept exploits to validate these vulnerabilities on various operating systems, successfully targeting the libblockdev/udisks flaw on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE Leap 15.
A new attack technique named Policy Puppetry can break the protections of major gen-AI models to produce harmful outputs.
The Sysdig Threat Research Team (TRT) has discovered CVE-2025-32955, a now-patched vulnerability in Harden-Runner, one of the most popular GitHub Action CI/CD security tools. Exploiting this vulnerability allows an attacker to bypass Harden-Runner’s disable-sudo security mechanism, effectively evading detection within the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline under certain conditions. To mitigate this risk, users are strongly advised to update to the latest version.
The CVE has been assigned a CVSS v3.1 base score of 6.0.
Next.js is an open-source web framework built by Vercel that powers React-based apps with features like server-side and static rendering. Recently, a critical vulnerability (CVE) was disclosed that lets attackers bypass middleware-based authorization checks. The issue was originally discovered and analyzed by Rachid Allam (zhero). In this blog, we’ll break down the vulnerability and walk through their research and will create a Nuclei template to help you detect it across your assets.
Cisco recently released an advisory for CVE-2024-20439 here. (nvd) Please note I did not discover this vulnerability, I just reverse engineered the vulnerability from the advisory
On Wednesday, March 19, 2025, backup and recovery software provider Veeam published a security advisory for a critical remote code execution vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-23120. The vulnerability affects Backup & Replication systems that are domain joined. Veeam explicitly mentions that domain-joined backup servers are against security and compliance best practices, but in reality, we believe this is likely to be a relatively common configuration
It affected (before patching) all currently-maintained branches, and recently was highlighted by CISA as being exploited-in-the-wild.
This must be the first time real-world attackers have reversed a patch, and reproduced a vulnerability, before some dastardly researchers released a detection artefact generator tool of their own. /s
At watchTowr's core, we're all about identifying and validating ways into organisations - sometimes through vulnerabilities in network border appliances - without requiring such luxuries as credentials or asset lists.