Zyxel warns customers of attacks on its enterprise firewall and VPN devices

Networking equipment giant Zyxel warns customers of a series of attacks that have been targeting some of its enterprise firewall and VPN devices.

Networking equipment vendor Zyxel warned its customers of a series of attacks that have been targeting some of its enterprise firewall and VPN server solutions. The threat actors are targeting the USG, ZyWALL, USG FLEX, ATP, and VPN series running on-premise ZLD firmware. The company states that devices running the Nebula cloud management mode are not impacted.

“We recently became aware of a sophisticated threat actor targeting a small subset of Zyxel security appliances that have remote management or SSL VPN enabled, namely in the USG/ZyWALL, USG FLEX, ATP, and VPN series running on-premise ZLD firmware.” reads the email sent to the customers by the company. “We’re aware of the situation and have been working our best to investigate and resolve it.”

The vendor reported that attackers are attempting to access network devices through WAN. Upon accessing the devices, attackers then bypass authentication and establish SSL VPN tunnels with unknown user accounts (i.e. ”zyxel_slIvpn”, “zyxel_ts”, or “zyxel_vpn_test”) to manipulate the device’s configuration.

The company did not reveal if the hackers are exploiting a known vulnerability or a zero-day flaw.

At the time of this writing, it is not clear if the hackers breached one of the customers of the vendor.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Zyxel)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.