Cisco has issued patches and mitigation instructions for 16 of its wireless products, to take care of a number of denial of service vulnerabilities and one unauthorised access vulnerability.

Let's deal with the most severe issue first. The Cisco IOS code pushed to a number of Aironet access points under the control of a Cisco Wireless LAN Controller (WNC) has a bug that could allow unauthorised privileged access to the device.

This affects Aironet 1260, 2600, 3500 and 3600 devices. Cisco describes the problem as “a rare condition” that would allow the admin HTTP server of a device to be enabled even though an admin thinks it's switched off.

“An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by attempting to authenticate to an affected device using locally-stored credentials of the AP. A successful attack could allow an attacker to take complete control of the affected AP and make arbitrary changes to the configuration,” the Borg's security notice says.

Cisco says users can mitigate this by using global access point management credentials, so that the locally-stored credentials aren't used.

In addition, there are a number of DoS vulnerabilities in Cisco's Wireless LAN Controllers:

Devices with WebAuth turned on can be crashed by an attacker sending lots of requests;

Crafted IGMP messages can crash affected devices; and

There are two crafted frame vulnerabilities that can crash devices.

The Borg has released updated software for the devices at the link above. ®