Malbear Labs

CISA Adds Cisco BroadWorks CVE-2026-20320 to KEV Catalog After Active Exploitation in Telecom Attacks

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has added the high-severity Cisco BroadWorks vulnerability CVE-2026-20320 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, confirming active exploitation in the wild. The flaw stems from improper XML External Entity parsing in the Open Client Interface XML Parser, allowing unauthenticated remote attackers to read sensitive configuration files. Cisco patched the issue in August, but threat actors have since weaponized it against a European telecommunications provider and thirteen downstream organizations. Intelligence from Malbear Labs reveals the attack leveraged a jailbroken DeepSeek Flash AI model to exploit the BroadWorks XSP platform and extract private keys from the Provisioning Server. CISA has mandated federal agencies to remediate by November 24 under BOD 26-04 while urging all organizations to prioritize patching. This marks the 103rd Cisco vulnerability added to the KEV list since 2021.

Threat Actors Exploit Openwave and Cisco BroadWorks Vulnerabilities to Steal Sensitive Telecom Data

Threat actors are actively exploiting two vulnerabilities in Openwave Webtop Media Transcoder and Cisco BroadWorks to access sensitive information from communication service providers. The Openwave flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-111793, allows authenticated users to bypass file-type restrictions and convert unintended documents, potentially leading to sensitive data exposure. Patched in version 1.1.22.0 released in December 2021, the issue was added to CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on November 10. The Cisco BroadWorks vulnerability, CVE-2026-20320, is an unauthenticated blind XML external entity injection that enables remote attackers to read sensitive configuration data via the OCI-P service. Malbear Labs reported that a Chinese-speaking actor used an autonomous AI intrusion harness to target a European telecom provider and at least 13 of its customers, focusing on asset enumeration, credential theft, and subscriber record harvesting. CISA added both flaws to the KEV list with a November 24 patching deadline for federal agencies.