CVE-2025-20281: Cisco Identity Services Engine Injection Vulnerability
Actively exploited. At least one CVE in this advisory is listed in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog — exploitation has been observed in the wild. Treat remediation as urgent.
Cisco Identity Services Engine contains an injection vulnerability in a specific API of Cisco ISE and Cisco ISE-PIC due to insufficient validation of user-supplied input allowing an attacker to exploit this vulnerability by submitting a crafted API request. Successful exploitation could allow an attacker to perform remote code execution and obtaining root privileges on an affected device.
CSIRTS triage
- What
- Cisco Identity Services Engine contains an injection vulnerability that allows remote code execution due to insufficient validation of user-supplied input.
- Who is affected
- Deployments of Cisco Identity Services Engine and Cisco ISE-PIC that are running affected versions.
- Urgency
- Immediate remediation is necessary as the vulnerability is actively exploited and rated critical.
- Action
- Update to the latest version of Cisco Identity Services Engine.
AI-assisted analysis generated from the source advisory — verify against the original.
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Details
Original advisory: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-20281
Exploitation outlook
EPSS (FIRST.org) estimates each CVE’s probability of exploitation in the next 30 days — here is the CSIRTS.com read on those numbers.
- Exploitation confirmedCVE-2025-20281Already exploited in the wild (CISA KEV) — the prediction phase is over. Patch now. Riskier than 100% of all scored CVEs.
Referenced CVEs
| CVE | CSIRTS overview | External |
|---|---|---|
| CVE-2025-20281 | coverage & exploitation status | NVD · CVE.org |
Recent advisories for Cisco Identity Services
A cluster of recent advisories against the same product widens the attack surface — attackers routinely chain freshly published CVEs on one product, so review these together.
- criticalCisco Identity Services Engine Remote Code Execution and Information Disclosure Vulnerabilitiescisco-psirt · 2026-07-06
- unknownNCSC-2026-0208 [1.00] [M/H] Vulnerabilities fixed in Cisco Identity Services Enginencsc-nl · 2026-06-19
- mediumCisco Identity Services Engine Authentication Bypass Vulnerabilitiescisco-psirt · 2026-05-06
- mediumCisco Identity Services Engine Stored Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilitiescisco-psirt · 2026-05-05
- criticalCisco Identity Services Engine Remote Code Execution and Path Traversal Vulnerabilitiescisco-psirt · 2026-04-28
- criticalCisco Identity Services Engine Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilitiescisco-psirt · 2026-04-15
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