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.

Published · last modified .

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.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.005 (41.5th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 42nd percentile — 41.5% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-20177: held from 0.004 to 0.005.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.004 · newest: 0.005 · change: +0.001

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.