Citrix Releases Patches for Critical ADC Vulnerability Under Active Attack

Citrix has finally started rolling out security patches for a critical vulnerability in ADC and Gateway software that attackers started exploiting in the wild earlier this month after the company announced the existence of the issue without releasing any permanent fix.

I wish I could say, “better late than never,” but since hackers don’t waste time or miss any opportunity to exploit vulnerable systems, even a short window of time resulted in the compromise of hundreds of Internet exposed Citrix ADC and Gateway systems.

As explained earlier on The Hacker News, the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-19781, is a path traversal issue that could allow unauthenticated remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on several versions of Citrix ADC and Gateway products, as well as on the two older versions of Citrix SD-WAN WANOP.

Rated critical with CVSS v3.1 base score 9.8, the issue was discovered by Mikhail Klyuchnikov, a security researcher at Positive Technologies, who responsibly reported it to Citrix in early December.

The vulnerability is actively being exploited in the wild since last week by dozens of hacking groups and individual attackers—thanks to the public release of…