Secunia

A vulnerability has been reported in Cisco Security Monitoring, Analysis and Response System (CS-MARS), which can be exploited by malicious, local users to gain escalated privileges.

The vulnerability is caused due to CS-MARS appliances being shipped with a default password for an undocumented administrative root account that is intended for debugging purposes. This can be exploited by malicious users to gain root privileges using the undocumented "expert" command. The password for the account reportedly cannot be changed.

Successful exploitation requires logon to the administration command line interface with e.g. the "pnadmin" account.

The vulnerability has been reported in versions prior to 4.1.3.

Solution
Update to version 4.1.3 or later and use the "passwd expert" command to change the root password.
Further details available in Customer Area

Provided and/or discovered by
Reported by vendor.

Changelog
Further details available in Customer Area

Original Advisory
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/707/cisco-sa-20060111-mars.shtml

Deep Links
Links available in Customer Area