The Australian Indicators Directorate (ASD) has issued a bulletin about ongoing cyber assaults concentrating on unpatched Cisco IOS XE units within the nation with a beforehand undocumented implant generally known as BADCANDY.
The exercise, per the intelligence company, entails the exploitation of CVE-2023-20198 (CVSS rating: 10.0), a important vulnerability that permits a distant, unauthenticated attacker to create an account with elevated privileges and use it to grab management of inclined techniques.
The safety defect has come below lively exploitation within the wild since final 2023, with China-linked menace actors like Salt Hurricane weaponizing it in latest months to breach telecommunications suppliers.
ASD famous that variations of BADCANDY have been detected since October 2023, with a recent set of assaults persevering with to be recorded in 2024 and 2025. As many as 400 units in Australia are estimated to have been compromised with the malware since July 2025, out of which 150 units had been contaminated in October alone.
“BADCANDY is a low fairness Lua-based net shell, and cyber actors have sometimes utilized a non-persistent patch post-compromise to masks the system’s vulnerability standing in relation to CVE-2023-20198,” it mentioned. “In these situations, the presence of the BADCANDY implant signifies compromise of the Cisco IOS XE system, through CVE-2023-20198.”
The dearth of a persistence mechanism means it can not survive throughout system reboots. Nevertheless, if the system stays unpatched and uncovered to the web, it is potential for the menace actor to re-introduce the malware and regain entry to it.
ASD has assessed that the menace actors are capable of detect when the implant is eliminated and are infecting the units once more. That is based mostly on the truth that re-exploitation has occurred on units for which the company has beforehand issued notifications to affected entities.
That having mentioned, a reboot won’t undo different actions undertaken by the attackers. It is subsequently important that system operators apply the patches, restrict public publicity of the net person interface, and comply with obligatory hardening pointers issued by Cisco to stop future exploitation makes an attempt.
A few of the different actions outlined by the company are listed beneath –
- Overview the working configuration for accounts with privilege 15 and take away sudden or unapproved accounts
- Overview accounts with random strings or “cisco_tac_admin,” “cisco_support,” “cisco_sys_manager,” or “cisco” and take away them if not professional
- Overview the working configuration for unknown tunnel interfaces
- Overview TACACS+ AAA command accounting logging for configuration modifications, if enabled
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