⚠ Known Exploited Vulnerability (KEV) Tracker

Description

Cisco IOS XE contains a command injection vulnerability in the web user interface. When chained with CVE-2023-20198, the attacker can leverage the new local user to elevate privilege to root and write the implant to the file system. Cisco identified CVE-2023-20273 as the vulnerability exploited to deploy the implant. CVE-2021-1435, previously associated with the exploitation events, is no longer believed to be related to this activity.

Lifecycle Timeline

• 2023-10-16
  Public exploit code

  Metasploit — Cisco IOX XE unauthenticated OS command execution

  Metasploit →
• 2023-10-23
  Added to CISA KEV 7 days later

  Listed as known exploited, which starts the federal remediation clock.

  CISA KEV →
• 2023-10-24
  CVE published 1 day later

  Entered the public CVE record.

  CVE.org →
• 2023-10-27
  Federal remediation due 3 days later

  Deadline for federal civilian agencies under BOD 22-01 — now passed.

  CISA KEV
• 2024-11-12
  First national advisory 13 months later

  CISA — 2023 Top Routinely Exploited Vulnerabilities

  CyberzSOC advisory index →
• not recorded
  EPSS flags exploitation risk

  Reached 10% only through a model recalibration, which moves every score at once and says nothing about this CVE.
• not recorded
  Vendor fix published

  No dated vendor fix. Only Microsoft publishes a machine-readable release date; other vendors state a fixed version without one.

Each milestone comes from a different source, so gaps between them are gaps in what those sources publish, not evidence that nothing happened. EPSS history for this CVE holds 164 points from 2023-10-28, tracked daily from 2026-09-09; earlier points are weekly, which dates a spike to within a week. Peak probability 92.9% on 2025-04-12.

Published Applicability

Check whether a specific version is affected →

What each source publishes about which product versions carry this vulnerability, kept as written rather than merged. Absence here means no source has published applicability data, not that nothing is affected.

Research & News Coverage

No mentions found in monitored research blogs or news feeds.

Detection & Exploitation

Coverage across public collections only: Nuclei and OpenVAS NVT (scan); Snort and Suricata ET Open (network); Sigma and YARA (host/SIEM); Metasploit, Exploit-DB and public GitHub repositories (exploit). Absence here means nothing public was found, not that detection is impossible.
GitHub PoC repositories are collected automatically by PoC-in-GitHub (CC0) and are not vetted: some are fakes and some are malware. Treat them as evidence that code was published, not as code to run.
OpenVAS coverage derives from the Greenbone Community Feed, made available under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0; its individual Vulnerability Tests are licensed GNU GPL v2.

CISA Assessment (Vulnrichment / SSVC)

D3FEND Countermeasures

Defensive techniques inferred by MITRE D3FEND from the underlying weakness (CWE-78) — general hardening and detection guidance for this weakness class, not a vendor patch for this specific CVE.

KEV Catalog Status

Listed By

Referenced in Advisories

Weaponization Timeline — Offensive & Testing Tools

No exploit-tool sightings recorded for this CVE.

Evidence tiers are explained on the About page — a merged Metasploit module is far stronger evidence than a distro package mention.

External References

CVE.org record → NVD entry → CISA KEV catalog → FortiGuard Labs → Rapid7 AttackerKB →