Resource exhaustion in Cisco Industrial Ethernet Switches

CVE-2026-20177

A vulnerability in the handling of management plane packets by Cisco Industrial Ethernet (IE) 1000 Series Switches could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the device manager, SSH, or API to become inaccessible.This vulnerability is due to insufficient protection against management plane flooding attacks. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a high rate of ICMP, SSH, or HTTP traffic to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the CPU of the device to increase, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition on the device manager web GUI, SSH, or API. Data traffic through the device is not affected.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 5.3 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L.

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-20177?
CVE-2026-20177 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Cisco Industrial Ethernet Switches, classified under Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling. CVSS score: 5.3/10. Published 2026-08-19.
How severe is CVE-2026-20177?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.3 out of 10.