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CVE-2017-12238

Medium 6.5 Exploited in the wild (KEV)

Confirmed active exploitation — CISA KEV catalog

Name
Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series Switches VPLS Denial-of-Service Vulnerability
Added to catalog
Remediation due date (US federal)
Required action
Apply updates per vendor instructions.

Description

A vulnerability in the Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) code of Cisco IOS 15.0 through 15.4 for Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series Switches could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause a C6800-16P10G or C6800-16P10G-XL type line card to crash, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition. The vulnerability is due to a memory management issue in the affected software. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by creating a large number of VPLS-generated MAC entries in the MAC address table of an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a C6800-16P10G or C6800-16P10G-XL type line card to crash, resulting in a DoS condition. This vulnerability affects Cisco Catalyst 6800 Series Switches that are running a vulnerable release of Cisco IOS Software and have a Cisco C6800-16P10G or C6800-16P10G-XL line card in use with Supervisor Engine 6T. To be vulnerable, the device must also be configured with VPLS and the C6800-16P10G or C6800-16P10G-XL line card needs to be the core-facing MPLS interfaces. Cisco Bug IDs: CSCva61927.

Metrics

CVSS 3.1
6.5 (MEDIUM) Score source: NVD CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS — exploit probability
2% (percentile: 81) as of 1 November 2026
CWE
CWE-399

Affected products

cisco: ios; cisco: c6800-16p10g; cisco: c6800-16p10g-xl; cisco: catalyst 6000; cisco: catalyst 6000 ws-svc-nam-1; cisco: catalyst 6000 ws-svc-nam-2; cisco: catalyst 6000 ws-x6380-nam; cisco: catalyst 6500; cisco: catalyst 6500-e; cisco: catalyst 6500 ws-svc-nam-1; cisco: catalyst 6500 ws-svc-nam-2; cisco: catalyst 6500 ws-x6380-nam; cisco: catalyst 6503-e; cisco: catalyst 6504-e; cisco: catalyst 6506-e

References