Security News > 2023 > July > 300,000+ Fortinet firewalls vulnerable to critical FortiOS RCE bug
Hundreds of thousands of FortiGate firewalls are vulnerable to a critical security issue identified as CVE-2023-27997, almost a month after Fortinet released an update that addresses the problem.
CVE-2023-27997 is exploitable and allows an unauthenticated attacker to execute code remotely on vulnerable devices with the SSL VPN interface exposed on the web.
Offensive security solutions company Bishop Fox reported on Friday that despite the calls to patch, more than 300,000 FortiGate firewall appliances are still vulnerable to attacks and reachable over the public internet.
The query above showed 489,337 devices but not all of them were vulnerable to CVE-2023-27997, also referred to as Xortigate.
Another discovery Bishop Fox researchers made was that many of the exposed FortiGate devices did not receive an update for the past eight years, some of them running FortiOS 6, which reached end of support last year on September 29.
These devices are vulnerable to several critical-severity flaws that have proof-of-concept exploit code publicly available.
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Related Vulnerability
| DATE | CVE | VULNERABILITY TITLE | RISK |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-06-13 | CVE-2023-27997 | Out-of-bounds Write vulnerability in Fortinet Fortios and Fortiproxy A heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability [CWE-122] in FortiOS version 7.2.4 and below, version 7.0.11 and below, version 6.4.12 and below, version 6.0.16 and below and FortiProxy version 7.2.3 and below, version 7.0.9 and below, version 2.0.12 and below, version 1.2 all versions, version 1.1 all versions SSL-VPN may allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code or commands via specifically crafted requests. | 9.8 |