Cisco Secure Client Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

Summary

A vulnerability in the interprocess communication (IPC) channel of the Secure Firewall Posture module in Cisco Secure Client could allow an authenticated, local attacker to elevate privileges on an affected device. This vulnerability is due to insufficient validation of user-supplied input. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a series of crafted IPC messages to a local socket. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to perform limited file write operations on the filesystem with SYSTEM or root privileges. Although this vulnerability affects the Secure Firewall Posture module in Cisco Secure Client on Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems, this vulnerability could be used to obtain full root privileges on macOS and Linux. For that reason Cisco has assigned this security advisory a Security Impact Rating (SIR) of High rather than Medium as the score indicates.

Timeline

1. Oct 21, 2026, 12:00 AM UTCCISA SSVC assessment

   Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: total

2. Oct 21, 2026, 4:14 PM UTCCVE published
3. Oct 22, 2026, 9:34 PM UTCFirst seen by cve.now
4. Oct 22, 2026, 11:04 PM UTCRecord last updated

Affected versions

• Cisco Cisco Secure Client

  4.9.00086, 4.9.01095, 4.9.02028, 4.9.03047, 4.9.03049, 4.9.04043, 4.9.04053, 4.9.05042, 4.9.06037, 4.10.00093, 4.10.01075, 4.10.02086, 4.10.03104, 4.10.04065, 4.10.04071, 4.10.05085, 4.10.05095, 5.0.00238, 4.10.05111, 5.0.00529, 5.0.00556, 4.10.06079, 5.0.01242, 4.10.06090, 5.0.02075, 4.10.07061, 5.0.03072, 4.10.07062, 5.0.03076, 5.0.04032, and 27 more

References 1