Existential Dread in 2025: SonicWall SMA100 Vulnerabilities Highlight Old-School Risks
Researchers at watchTowr Labs have uncovered three serious vulnerabilities in SonicWall’s SMA100 series, all exploitable before authentication and stemming from outdated coding practices. The flaws, tracked as CVE-2025-40596, CVE-2025-40597, and CVE-2025-40598, include a pre-auth stack-based buffer overflow, a pre-auth heap-based buffer overflow, and a reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability. While exploitation for reliable remote code execution remains complex, the presence of such vulnerabilities in 2025 is a sobering reminder that basic input handling errors continue to plague critical network appliances.
The stack and heap overflow issues arise from unsafe use of legacy functions within the SSLVPN’s HTTP parsing code, while the XSS vulnerability highlights disabled web application firewall protections on management interfaces. Researchers note these flaws exemplify how attackers—particularly advanced persistent threat groups—can weaponize even seemingly trivial oversights. The findings underscore the urgent need for organizations to apply SonicWall’s security advisories promptly and to embrace continuous testing, proactive threat intelligence, and exposure management to stay ahead of evolving attack techniques.
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