The Australian Alerts Directorate (ASD) has issued a bulletin about ongoing cyber assaults focusing on unpatched Cisco IOS XE units within the nation with a beforehand undocumented implant often called BADCANDY.
The exercise, per the intelligence company, includes 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 prone programs.
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 contemporary 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 internet shell, and cyber actors have usually utilized a non-persistent patch post-compromise to masks the gadget’s vulnerability standing in relation to CVE-2023-20198,” it mentioned. “In these cases, the presence of the BADCANDY implant signifies compromise of the Cisco IOS XE gadget, by way of CVE-2023-20198.”
The shortage of a persistence mechanism means it can’t survive throughout system reboots. Nonetheless, if the gadget stays unpatched and uncovered to the web, it is attainable for the menace actor to re-introduce the malware and regain entry to it.
ASD has assessed that the menace actors are in a position to 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 is not going to undo different actions undertaken by the attackers. It is subsequently important that system operators apply the patches, restrict public publicity of the online consumer interface, and comply with obligatory hardening pointers issued by Cisco to forestall future exploitation makes an attempt.
A few of the different actions outlined by the company are listed under –
- Evaluation the working configuration for accounts with privilege 15 and take away sudden or unapproved accounts
- Evaluation accounts with random strings or “cisco_tac_admin,” “cisco_support,” “cisco_sys_manager,” or “cisco” and take away them if not authentic
- Evaluation the working configuration for unknown tunnel interfaces
- Evaluation TACACS+ AAA command accounting logging for configuration modifications, if enabled
