Cisco remediation COP files remain stuck

Recently, a Cisco bulletin was released to inform about severe security vulnerabilities.

Unified Communications Manager (Unified CM) (CSCwd64245)
Unified Communications Manager IM & Presence Service (Unified CM IM&P) (CSCwd64276)
Unified Communications Manager Session Management Edition (Unified CM SME) (CSCwd64245)
Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) (CSCwe18773)
Unity Connection (CSCwd64292)
Virtualized Voice Browser (VVB) (CSCwe18840)

As usual, we immediately applied the patches through the COP files found on the Cisco website in the download section for each product.
The installation was successfully completed, but the task on all Cisco products (CUCM, CUC, CUPS, UCCX) remains stuck.
Obviously, there’s no way to stop it because the installation of the COP files is managed by two semaphore files named /var/log/install/upgrade_status.xml and under /tmp, the file upgradeState.ser.
We tried from the console, in CLI, to stop the installation, but there’s no way, not even by rebooting the virtual appliance.

The only way is to enter as a superuser (rooted) and execute the following commands:

utils remote_account enable
utils remote_account create ciscotac 3
(You don’t need it if your VA is already rooted)

cd /var/log/install/
mv upgrade_status.xml upgrade_status.xml.orig
rm -rf /var/log/install/upgrade_status.xml
cd /tmp
rm – f upgradeState.ser

utils remote_account disable