The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: Router hacking

A never-before-seen remote access trojan dubbed ZuoRAT has been singling out small office/home office (SOHO) routers as part of a sophisticated campaign targeting North American and European networks. The malware "grants the actor the ability to pivot into the local network and gain access to additional systems on the LAN by hijacking network communications to maintain an undetected foothold," researchers from Lumen Black Lotus Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The stealthy operation, which targeted routers from ASUS, Cisco, DrayTek, and NETGEAR, is believed to have commenced in early 2020 during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, effectively remaining under the radar for over two years. "Consumers and remote employees routinely use SOHO routers, but these devices are rarely monitored or patched, which makes them one of the weakest points of a network's perimeter," the company's threat intelligence team said. Initial access

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced that it neutralized Cyclops Blink , a modular botnet controlled by a threat actor known as Sandworm, which has been attributed to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU). "The operation copied and removed malware from vulnerable internet-connected firewall devices that Sandworm used for command-and-control (C2) of the underlying botnet," the DoJ  said  in a statement Wednesday. In addition to disrupting its C2 infrastructure, the operation also closed the external management ports that the threat actor used to establish connections with the firewall appliances, effectively severing contact and preventing the hacking group from using the infected devices to commandeer the botnet. The March 22 court-authorized disruption of Cyclops Blink comes a little over a month after intelligence agencies in the U.K. and the U.S.  described  the botnet as a replacement fram

Networking equipment company Netgear has released patches to remediate a high-severity remote code execution vulnerability affecting multiple routers that could be exploited by remote attackers to take control of an affected system. Traced as  CVE-2021-40847  (CVSS score: 8.1), the security weakness impacts the following models - R6400v2 (fixed in firmware version 1.0.4.120) R6700 (fixed in firmware version 1.0.2.26) R6700v3 (fixed in firmware version 1.0.4.120) R6900 (fixed in firmware version 1.0.2.26) R6900P (fixed in firmware version 3.3.142_HOTFIX) R7000 (fixed in firmware version 1.0.11.128) R7000P (fixed in firmware version 1.3.3.142_HOTFIX) R7850 (fixed in firmware version 1.0.5.76) R7900 (fixed in firmware version 1.0.4.46) R8000 (fixed in firmware version 1.0.4.76) RS400 (fixed in firmware version 1.5.1.80) According to GRIMM security researcher Adam Nichols, the vulnerability resides within Circle , a third-party component included in the firmware that offer

Networking equipment major Cisco Systems has said it does not plan to fix a critical security vulnerability affecting some of its Small Business routers, instead urging users to replace the devices. The bug, tracked as CVE-2021-1459, is rated with a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10, and affects RV110W VPN firewall and Small Business RV130, RV130W, and RV215W routers, allowing an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on an affected appliance. The flaw, which stems from improper validation of user-supplied input in the web-based management interface, could be exploited by a malicious actor to send specially-crafted HTTP requests to the targeted device and achieve remote code execution. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code as the root user on the underlying operating system of the affected device," Cisco  said  in its advisory. Security researcher Treck Zhou has been credited with reporting the vulnerability. Although th

Some widely sold D-Link VPN router models have been found vulnerable to three new high-risk security vulnerabilities, leaving millions of home and business networks open to cyberattacks—even if they are secured with a strong password. Discovered by researchers at Digital Defense, the three security shortcomings were responsibly disclosed to D-Link on August 11, which, if exploited, could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands on vulnerable networking devices via specially-crafted requests and even launch denial-of-service attacks. D-Link DSR-150, DSR-250, DSR-500, and DSR-1000AC and other VPN router models in the DSR Family running firmware version 3.14 and 3.17 are vulnerable to the remotely exploitable root command injection flaw. The Taiwanese networking equipment maker  confirmed  the issues in an advisory on December 1, adding that the patches were under development for two of three flaws, which have now been released to the public at the time of writing. "

The federal prosecutors in the United States have charged Uber's former chief security officer, Joe Sullivan , for covering up a massive data breach that the ride-hailing company suffered in 2016. According to the press release published by the U.S. Department of Justice, Sullivan "took deliberate steps to conceal, deflect, and mislead the Federal Trade Commission about the breach" that also involved paying hackers $100,000 ransom to keep the incident secret. "A criminal complaint was filed today in federal court charging Joseph Sullivan with obstruction of justice and misprision of a felony in connection with the attempted cover-up of the 2016 hack of Uber Technologies," it says. The 2016 Uber's data breach exposed names, email addresses, phone numbers of 57 million Uber riders and drivers, and driver license numbers of around 600,000 drivers. The company revealed this information to the public almost a year later in 2017, immediately after Su

Cybersecurity researchers with Qihoo 360's NetLab today unveiled details of two recently spotted zero-day cyberattack campaigns in the wild targeting enterprise-grade networking devices manufactured by Taiwan-based DrayTek. According to the report , at least two separate groups of hackers exploited two critical remote command injection vulnerabilities ( CVE-2020-8515 ) affecting DrayTek Vigor enterprise switches, load-balancers, routers and VPN gateway devices to eavesdrop on network traffic and install backdoors. The zero-day attacks started somewhere at the end of last November or at the beginning of December and are potentially still ongoing against thousands of publicly exposed DrayTek switche s, Vigor 2960, 3900, 300B devices that haven't yet been patched with the latest firmware updates released last month. The zero-day vulnerabilities in question can be exploited by any unauthorized remote attackers to inject and execute arbitrary commands on the system, as als

Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered a new high-severity hardware vulnerability residing in the widely-used Wi-Fi chips manufactured by Broadcom and Cypress—apparently powering over a billion devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, routers, and IoT gadgets. Dubbed ' Kr00k ' and tracked as CVE-2019-15126 , the flaw could let nearby remote attackers intercept and decrypt some wireless network packets transmitted over-the-air by a vulnerable device. The attacker does not need to be connected to the victim's wireless network and the flaw works against vulnerable devices using WPA2-Personal or WPA2-Enterprise protocols, with AES-CCMP encryption, to protect their network traffic. "Our tests confirmed some client devices by Amazon (Echo, Kindle), Apple (iPhone, iPad, MacBook), Google (Nexus), Samsung (Galaxy), Raspberry (Pi 3), Xiaomi (RedMi), as well as some access points by Asus and Huawei, were vulnerable to Kr00k," ESET researchers said. Acc

The world of connected consumer electronics, IoT, and smart devices is growing faster than ever with tens of billions of connected devices streaming and sharing data wirelessly over the Internet, but how secure is it? As we connect everything from coffee maker to front-door locks and cars to the Internet, we're creating more potential—and possibly more dangerous—ways for hackers to wreak havoc. Believe me, there are over 100 ways a hacker can ruin your life just by compromising your wireless router —a device that controls the traffic between your local network and the Internet, threatening the security and privacy of a wide range of wireless devices, from computers and phones to IP Cameras, smart TVs and connected appliances. In its latest study titled " SOHOpelessly Broken 2.0 ," Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) discovered a total of 125 different security vulnerabilities across 13 small office/home office (SOHO) routers and Network Attached Storage (NAS) de

What could be worse than your router leaking its administrative login credentials in plaintext? Cybersecurity researchers from Trustwave's SpiderLabs have discovered multiple security vulnerabilities in some router models from two popular manufacturers—D-Link and Comba Telecom—that involve insecure storage of credentials, potentially affecting every user and system on that network. Researcher Simon Kenin told The Hacker News that he discovered a total of five vulnerabilities—two in a D-Link DSL modem typically installed to connect a home network to an ISP, and three in multiple Comba Telecom WiFi devices. These flaws could potentially allow attackers to change your device settings, extract sensitive information, perform MitM attacks, redirect you to phishing or malicious sites and launch many more types of attacks. "Since your router is the gateway in and out of your entire network it can potentially affect every user and system on that network. An attacker-controlled

Taiwanese networking equipment manufacturer D-Link has agreed to implement a "comprehensive software security program" in order to settle a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lawsuit alleging that the company didn't take adequate steps to protect its consumers from hackers. Your wireless router is the first line of defense against potential threats on the Internet. However, sadly, most widely-used routers fail to offer necessary security features and have often found vulnerable to serious security flaws, eventually enabling remote attackers to unauthorizedly access networks and compromise the security of other devices connected to it. In recent years, the security of wireless networks has been more of a hot topic due to cyber attacks, as well as has gained headlines after the discovery of critical vulnerabilities—such as authentication bypass , remote code execution , hard-coded login credentials , and information disclosure—in routers manufactured by various brands.

A cybersecurity researcher at Tenable has discovered multiple security vulnerabilities in Verizon Fios Quantum Gateway Wi-Fi routers that could allow remote attackers to take complete control over the affected routers, exposing every other device connected to it. Currently used by millions of consumers in the United States, Verizon Fios Quantum Gateway Wi-Fi routers have been found vulnerable to three security vulnerabilities, identified as CVE-2019-3914, CVE-2019-3915, and CVE-2019-3916. The flaws in question are authenticated command injection (with root privileges), login replay , and password salt disclosure vulnerabilities in the Verizon Fios Quantum Gateway router (G1100), according to technical details Chris Lyne, a senior research engineer at Tenable, shared with The Hacker News. Authenticated Command Injection Flaw (CVE-2019-3914) When reviewing the log file on his router, Chris noticed that the "Access Control" rules in the Firewall settings, availabl

Security researchers have uncovered a new variant of the infamous Mirai Internet of Things botnet , this time targeting embedded devices intended for use within business environments in an attempt to gain control over larger bandwidth to carry out devastating DDoS attacks . Although the original creators of Mirai botnet have already been arrested and jailed , variants of the infamous IoT malware, including Satori and Okiru , keep emerging due to the availability of its source code on the Internet since 2016. First emerged in 2016, Mirai is well known IoT botnet malware that has the ability to infect routers, and security cameras, DVRs, and other smart devices—which typically use default credentials and run outdated versions of Linux—and enslaves the compromised devices to form a botnet, which is then used to conduct DDoS attacks . New Mirai Variant Targets Enterprise IoT Devices Now, Palo Alto Network Unit 42 researchers have spotted the newest variant of Mirai that'

If the connectivity and security of your organization rely on Cisco RV320 or RV325 Dual Gigabit WAN VPN routers, then you need to immediately install the latest firmware update released by the vendor last week. Cyber attackers have actively been exploiting two newly patched high-severity router vulnerabilities in the wild after a security researcher released their proof-of-concept exploit code on the Internet last weekend. The vulnerabilities in question are a command injection flaw (assigned CVE-2019-1652) and an information disclosure flaw (assigned CVE-2019-1653), a combination of which could allow a remote attacker to take full control of an affected Cisco router. The first issue exists in RV320 and RV325 dual gigabit WAN VPN routers running firmware versions 1.4.2.15 through 1.4.2.19, and the second affects firmware versions 1.4.2.15 and 1.4.2.17, according to the Cisco's advisory . Both the vulnerabilities, discovered and responsibly reported to the company by German s

A group of hackers has hijacked tens of thousands of Google's Chromecast streaming dongles, Google Home smart speakers and smart TVs with built-in Chromecast technology in recent weeks by exploiting a bug that's allegedly been ignored by Google for almost five years. The attackers, who go by Twitter handles @HackerGiraffe and @j3ws3r, managed to hijack Chromecasts' feeds and display a pop-up, spreading a security warning as well as controversial YouTube star PewDiePie propaganda. The hackers are the same ones who hijacked more than 50,000 internet-connected printers worldwide late last year by exploiting vulnerable printers to print out flyers asking everyone to subscribe to PewDiePie YouTube channel. This time, the hackers remotely scanned the internet for compatible devices, including Chromecasts, exposed to the internet through poorly configured routers that have Universal Plug and Play [UPnP] enabled by default. The hackers then exploited a design flaw in Chrome

A known vulnerability in MikroTik routers is potentially far more dangerous than previously thought. A cybersecurity researcher from Tenable Research has released a new proof-of-concept (PoC) RCE attack for an old directory traversal vulnerability that was found and patched within a day of its discovery in April this year. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2018-14847, was initially rated as medium in severity but should now be rated critical because the new hacking technique used against vulnerable MikroTik routers allows attackers to remotely execute code on affected devices and gain a root shell. The vulnerability impacts Winbox—a management component for administrators to set up their routers using a Web-based interface—and a Windows GUI application for the RouterOS software used by the MikroTik devices. The vulnerability allows "remote attackers to bypass authentication and read arbitrary files by modifying a request to change one byte related to a Session ID.&qu

Chinese cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a widespread, ongoing malware campaign that has already hijacked over 100,000 home routers and modified their DNS settings to hack users with malicious web pages—especially if they visit banking sites—and steal their login credentials. Dubbed GhostDNS , the campaign has many similarities with the infamous DNSChanger malware that works by changing DNS server settings on an infected device, allowing attackers to route the users' internet traffic through malicious servers and steal sensitive data. According to a new report from cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360's NetLab, just like the regular DNSChanger campaign, GhostDNS scans for the IP addresses for routers that use weak or no password at all, accesses the routers' settings, and then changes the router's default DNS address to the one controlled by the attackers. GhostDNS System: List of Modules and Sub-Modules The GhostDNS system mainly includes four modules:

Security researchers have discovered even more dangerous capabilities in VPNFilter —the highly sophisticated multi-stage malware that infected 500,000 routers worldwide in May this year, making it much more widespread and sophisticated than earlier. Attributed to Russia's APT 28, also known as 'Fancy Bear,' VPNFilter is a malware platform designed to infect routers and network-attached storage devices from 75 brands including Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear, TP-Link, QNAP, ASUS, D-Link, Huawei, ZTE, Ubiquiti, and UPVEL. In May, when VPNFilter infected half a million routers and NAS devices in 54 countries, the FBI seized a key command-and-control domain used by the malware and asked people to reboot their routers. Initially, it was found that VPNFilter had been built with multiple attack modules that could be deployed to the infected routers to steal website credentials and monitor industrial controls or SCADA systems, such as those used in electric grids, other infr