It was recently reported that Cisco Systems was hit with software and hardware issues.

The most serious issue is a firewall flaw that could allow hackers to cause them to fail. As the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) firewalls are deployed worldwide, the severity level of vulnerability is high.

The vulnerability is apparently due to an improper input validation of HTTPS requests. Hence, an attacker doesn’t need elevated privileges or special access to exploit the vulnerability, just a simple HTTPS request.

The users are then asked to install updates as soon as possible and to be vigilant of high memory usage as a sign of an attack and thus, to shut down their systems when they notice this.