The U.S.Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a newly disclosed vulnerability impacting Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, requiring Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to remediate the issue by May 17, 2026.
The vulnerability is a critical authentication bypass tracked as CVE-2026-20182. It's rated 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system, indicating maximum severity.
"Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Controller and Manager contain an authentication bypass vulnerability that allows an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication and obtain administrative privileges on an affected system," CISA said.
In a separate advisory, Cisco attributed the active exploitation of CVE-2026-20182 with high confidence to UAT-8616, the same cluster behind the weaponization of CVE-2026-20127 to gain unauthorized access to SD-WAN systems.
"UAT-8616 performed similar post-compromise actions after successfully exploiting CVE-2026-20182, as was observed in the exploitation of CVE-2026-20127 by the same threat actor," Cisco Talos said. "UAT-8616 attempted to add SSH keys, modify NETCONF configurations, and escalate to root privileges."
