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.
The vulnerability is a remote code execution resulting from a heap-based buffer overflow problem in FortiOS, the operating system that connects all Fortinet networking components to integrate them in the vendor’s Security Fabric platform.
CVE-2023-27997, also called XORtigate, that has a severity score of 9.8 out of 10, is exploitable and allows an unauthenticated attacker to execute code remotely on vulnerable devices with the SSL VPN interface exposed on the web.
Fortinet warned in an advisory that the issue may have been exploited in attacks. They addressed the vulnerability on June 11 before disclosing it publicly, by releasing FortiOS firmware versions 6.0.17, 6.2.15, 6.4.13, 7.0.12, and 7.2.5.
Cybersecurity firm, 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.
Bishop Fox researchers used the Shodan search engine to find devices that responded in a way that indicated an exposed SSL VPN interface.
Around 335,900 of the FortiGate firewalls reachable over the web are vulnerable to attacks. 153,414 of the discovered appliances had been updated to a patched FortiOS version.
The researchers also found 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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