Summary

Talos has become aware of active scanning against customer infrastructure with the intent of finding Cisco Smart Install clients. Cisco Smart Install is one component of the Cisco Smart Operations solution that facilitates the management of LAN switches. Research has indicated that malicious actors may be leveraging detailed knowledge of the Smart Install Protocol to obtain copies of customer configurations from affected devices. The attack leverages a known issue with the Smart Install protocol. Cisco PSIRT has published a security response to this activity. Abuse of the Smart Install protocol can lead to modification of the TFTP server setting, exfiltration of configuration files via TFTP, replacement of IOS image and potentially execution of IOS commands.

We are aware that a tool to scan for affected systems, called the Smart Install Exploitation Tool (SIET), has been publicly released and is available here. This tool may be being used in these attacks.

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