August 18, 2021
Cybersecurity company Rapid7 faced a dispute from tech firm Fortinet after Rapid7 published a report of a vulnerability in a Fortinet product before the company had time to release a patch to fix the issue.
Rapid7 stated that the vulnerability is related to CVE-2021-22123, which was addressed in FG-IR-20-120. The tech company added that users without a patch must “disable the FortiWeb device’s management interface from untrusted networks, including the internet.”
A Fortinet spokesperson criticized Rapid7 for violating the terms of its disclosure agreement. Fortinet has a 90-day Responsible disclosure window. The company stated that it has a clear disclosure policy on its PSIRT Policy page, which states that “asking incident submitters to maintain strict confidentiality until complete resolutions are available for customers.”
The report included a timeline stating that Rapid7 contacted Fortinet in June about the vulnerability, which was acknowledged by Fortinet by June 11. Rapid7 claims that they never received another word from Fortinet until they made the report public on Tuesday.
Fortinet did not respond to further questions about the patch that was supposed to fix the vulnerability.
Rapid7 updated its report to state that Fortiweb 6.4.1 will be released at the end of August and will receive a patch to fix the vulnerability.
Tod Beardsley, research director at Rapid7, said their vulnerability policy included a minimum of 60 days for vulnerability disclosure after initial contact attempts.
Beardsley also mentioned that there is no evidence that the vulnerability has been exploited, so Rapid7 “should be read as a cautionary piece for users of Fortinet’s FortiWeb.”
He stressed that FortiWeb users should not generally expose their administrative interface to the internet and ensure that those with authentication credentials choose solid and very strong passwords.
For more information, read the original story in ZDNet.
