Juniper Networks has released out-of-band updates to address high-severity vulnerabilities affecting SRX Series and EX Series. The identified flaws, tracked as CVE-2024-21619 and CVE-2024-21620, originate from the J-Web component and impact all versions of Junos OS. These vulnerabilities, if exploited, could empower threat actors to take control of susceptible systems. Discovered by cybersecurity firm watchTowr Labs, CVE-2024-21619 exposes a missing authentication vulnerability with a CVSS score of 5.3, potentially leading to the exposure of sensitive configuration information. Meanwhile, CVE-2024-21620, with a higher CVSS score of 8.8, represents a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that could enable the execution of arbitrary commands with the target’s permissions through a specially crafted request.
As a temporary mitigation until users can deploy the fixes, Juniper Networks recommends disabling J-Web or restricting access to trusted hosts. Notably, both CVE-2023-36846 and CVE-2023-36851, previously disclosed in August 2023, were added to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in November 2023, indicating evidence of active exploitation.
