Hackers are actively exploiting a trio of critical zero-day vulnerabilities in Cisco’s Identity Services Engine (ISE) and Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC), prompting urgent patching directives from the company. The flaws — CVE-2025-20281, CVE-2025-20282, and CVE-2025-20337 — each carry a maximum CVSS severity score of 10.0, indicating the highest possible risk. These vulnerabilities allow remote, unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code with root-level access, completely compromising the underlying system. Cisco has confirmed active exploitation attempts as of July 2025, making this not a theoretical threat but a real and present danger to enterprise networks.
Each vulnerability is distinct and does not require chaining, yet all enable full system compromise. CVE-2025-20281 and CVE-2025-20337 exploit poor input validation on exposed APIs, while CVE-2025-20282 takes advantage of insecure file handling to write malicious files into privileged directories. None of these attacks require credentials or user interaction, making exploitation trivial for attackers once systems are exposed to the internet or internal threat actors.
Cisco has urgently advised customers running ISE or ISE-PIC version 3.3 to upgrade to Patch 7, and version 3.4 to Patch 2. Importantly, earlier hot patches released by Cisco do not address CVE-2025-20337, leading to a patching gap for many organizations. There are no workarounds available — the only protection is to patch immediately.
This episode breaks down how the vulnerabilities work, what makes them so dangerous, and why attackers are targeting Cisco’s identity infrastructure right now. We also cover who discovered these bugs, Cisco’s delayed but critical patch guidance, and how privilege escalation to root on Linux opens the door for complete system takeover.
If your network uses Cisco ISE or ISE-PIC, this episode could be the difference between resilience and root-level compromise.
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