Finding Cisco Small Business Switches
Cisco recently disclosed several highly critical vulnerabilities that affect some of their Ethernet switches designed for small businesses. With a CVSSv3 score of 9.8, these vulnerabilities (assigned CVE-2023-20024, CVE-2023-20156, and CVE-2023-20157) are due to various faults in the handling of input to the web-based management interface of these switches. Successfully exploiting one of these vulnerabilities would allow an attacker to create a denial-of-service condition or execute arbitrary code with root privileges.
Along with this disclosure, Cisco announced updated software to address these issues. However, several of the affected models are past their End-of-Life (EOL) dates and no software updates have been released for them. Users are advised to update the software on affected systems as soon as possible and if updates for their devices are available.
Finding affected devices using runZero #
You can locate Cisco switches in your organization by visiting the Asset Inventory and using the following pre-built query:
hw:"Cisco" and type:"switch"
You can also limit your search to only the affected product families, using the following pre-built query:
hw:"Cisco" and type:"switch" and (snmp.modelNames:"CBS" or snmp.modelNames:"SF2" or snmp.modelNames:"SG2" or snmp.modelNames:"SF3" or snmp.modelNames:"SG3" or snmp.modelNames:"SF5" or snmp.modelNames:"SG5")
As always, any prebuilt queries we create are available from our Queries Library. Check out the library for other useful inventory queries.
Get runZero for free
Don’t have runZero and need help finding potentially vulnerable Cisco assets?
Get started

Rob King is a Principal Researcher at runZero. Over his career Rob has served as a senior researcher with KoreLogic, the architect for TippingPoint DVLabs, and helped get several startups off the ground. Rob helped design SC Magazine's Data Leakage Prevention Product of the Year for 2010, and was awarded the 3Com Innovator of the Year Award in 2009. He has been invited to speak at BlackHat, Shmoocon, SANS Network Security, and USENIX.
Similar Content
November 9, 2023
How to find SysAid Help Desk instances
How to find SysAid Help Desk instances # On the evening of November 8th Microsoft Threat Intelligence announced that they had discovered attacks by a ransomware gang against the SysAid Help Desk software using a zero-day exploit (CVE-2023-47246). These attacks leveraged a …
Read MoreNovember 1, 2023
How to find Apache ActiveMQ instances
How to find Apache ActiveMQ® instances # On October 25th the Apache team announced a vulnerability (CVE-2023-46604) in ActiveMQ that could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution. Shortly after the issue was disclosed exploits started to appear and the Rapid7 MDR team …
Read MoreOctober 30, 2023
Finding NGINX Ingress Controllers with runZero
Today, three vulnerabilities in the NGINX Ingress Controller for Kubernetes were disclosed, as described in this article from The Hacker News. These vulnerabilities have CVSS scores ranging from 7.6 to 8.8; all of these scores are considered high. These vulnerabilities have …
Read More