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The Enduring Terribleness of Home Router Security Matters to IoT

January 21, 2015 Paul Roberts

Last week, home broadband router maker ASUS was the latest vendor to issue an emergency patch for a critical vulnerability in its products. This, after proof-of-concept exploit code was released for the so-called “Inforsvr” vulnerability that affects several ASUS home routers. That vulnerability -if left unpatched – would allow anyone with access to a home- or small business network that used an ASUS broadband router to, essentially, commandeer the device. The “infosvr” feature is typically used for device discovery by the ASUS Wireless Router Device Discovery Utility, but the service also allowed unauthenticated users to execute commands through it using the “root” permissions, according to researcher Friedrich Postelstorfer, who created a proof of concept exploit for the security hole and released it on January 4. The exploit code finally prompted a patch from ASUS on January 13. The company had spent months analyzing the issue and working on a fix. Patch aside, it has been a worrying month for the […]

Cat and Mouse: Web Attacks Increasingly Sidestep WAF Protections

December 31, 2014 Or Katz

Recently, the Akamai Threat Research Team unveiled a unique distributed brute force attack campaign targeting nearly five hundred WordPress applications. What’s interesting about this campaign? It clearly demonstrates how Web attackers are becoming more sophisticated, attempting to evade security controls – specifically Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) and rate control protections. A Short Primer to Brute-Force Attacks Brute force Web attackers attempt to gain privileged access to a Web application by sending a very large set of login attempts, within a short period of time. Using volumetric single source of attack is easily mitigated by blacklisting. Today’s brute force attacks are typically characterized by volumetric attacks coming from distributed IPs. In this way, if the attacker’s source IP is detected, they can still continue with the attack campaign by switching a source IP. As part of this cat-and-mouse evolution, WAFs are enhanced with several rate control measures that detect and block […]

Please Apply Our 10 Year-Old Patch: The Dismal State of Embedded Device Security

December 22, 2014 Paul Roberts

On Friday, the firm Allegro Software of Boxborough, Massachusetts, released an odd-sounding statement encouraging all its customers to “maintain firmware for highest level of embedded device security.” Specifically, Allegro wanted to warn customers about the need to apply a software update to address two recently discovered vulnerabilities affecting its Rom Pager embedded web server: CVE-2014-9222 and CVE-2014-9223, collectively known as the “Misfortune Cookie” vulnerabilities. That patch in question was released almost ten years ago – in 2005. As reported widely last week, the vulnerabilities affecting the Rom Pager software can be found in some 12 million broadband routers by manufacturers including Linksys, D-Link, Huawei, TP-Link, ZTE and Edimax. In short: some of the most common sellers of broadband routers in the world. The security firm CheckPoint discovered the vulnerabilities and issued a report about them. (The report web site is here and a PDF format report is here.) According to CheckPoint, the Misfortune Cookie vulnerability has to […]

Concept Worm Could Spread Between Networked Attached Storage Systems

September 16, 2014 Paul Roberts

Kelly Jackson Higgins over at Dark Reading has a really interesting story about a researcher who is building a NAS worm. That’s right: some automated malware that will be capable of roaming the Internet finding and compromising consumer network attached storage (NAS) devices. Higgins interviewed Jacob Holcomb, a security analyst at the firm Independent Security Evaluators, has rolled more than two dozen previously unknown and undiscovered (‘zero day’) software vulnerabilities in NAS products into a proof-of-concept, self-replicating worm. According to Higgins, the worm scans for vulnerable services running on NAS systems — mostly web servers — and identifies the type of NAS device and whether it harbors the bugs. If a known, vulnerable platform is discovered, the worm launches the corresponding exploit from its quiver to take control of the device. Compromised devices are then used to scan for other, similar devices. Holcomb has already informed affected vendors – a list that includes […]

Securing Networks in the Internet of Things Era | Help Net

August 22, 2014 Paul Roberts

Cricket Liu, the CIO of Infoblox has an interesting editorial over at Help Net Security today that looks at the challenge of securing the Internet of Things. Among other things, he reveals the results of a commissioned survey of 400 network professionals in the UK and US that revealed that 78 percent already have precursor IoT devices on their networks – including badge readers, networked cash registers, vending machines and so on. Seventy three percent of those surveyed acknowledged using connected surveillance gear like CCTV on their networks. That shouldn’t be surprising. What is surprising is that a strong majority of respondents – 63 percent – also saw those devices and IoT in general as a threat to network security. So: IoT adoption is gaining speed, and worries about IoT security are gaining traction. The survey suggests that few IT organisations have deployed IoT-specific infrastructure, such as dedicated networks for IoT devices or management […]