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Fencer Vulns
high 7.5

CVE-2019-1983 json

Cisco Email Security Appliance and Cisco Content Security Management Appliance Denial of Service Vulnerability

published 2020-09-23 6 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2019-10540

cvss
7.5
version 3.0, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.9%
EPSS 1.9% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 79%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

A vulnerability in the email message filtering feature of Cisco AsyncOS Software for Cisco Email Security Appliance (ESA) and Cisco Content Security Management Appliance (SMA) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause repeated crashes in some internal processes that are running on the affected devices, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to insufficient input validation of email attachments. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending an email message with a crafted attachment through an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause specific processes to crash repeatedly, resulting in the complete unavailability of both the Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) and message tracking features and in severe performance degradation while processing email. After the affected processes restart, the software resumes filtering for the same attachment, causing the affected processes to crash and restart again. A successful exploit could also allow the attacker to cause a repeated DoS condition. Manual intervention may be required to recover from this situation.

Patch / fix

  • cisco asyncos 11.0.1-161, 11.0.3-251, 12.5.0-059

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
yes
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
23 mo ago

Exploit prediction

1.86% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 79% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.0 7.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 3.1 5.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
NVD 2.0 7.8 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C

Affected products

  • Cisco Cisco Email Security Appliance (ESA)

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-20 Improper Input Validation

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.