Cisco has patched a command-line injection flaw in a network management platform used to manage switches in data centers. According to researchers from Sygnia, the flaw has already been exploited by the China-backed threat group Velvet Ant.

(CVE-2024-20399, CVSS 6.0) enables authenticated attackers to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges on the underlying operating system of affected devices. This vulnerability resides in the command line interface (CLI) of Cisco NX-OS Software, essential for data center operations managers to troubleshoot and maintain NX-OS-enabled devices that operate on the Linux kernel.

“This vulnerability is due to insufficient validation of arguments that are passed to specific configuration CLI commands,” according to Cisco’s advisory on the flaw. “An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by including crafted input as the argument of an affected configuration CLI command.”