Pierluigi Paganini
November 17, 2015
The independent security researcher Varang Amin and the chief architect at Elastica’s Cloud Threat Labs Aditya Sood have discovered a vulnerability in the D-Link Switches belonging to the DGS-1210 Series Gigabit Smart Switches.
The security experts revealed the existence of the flaw at the ToorCon security conference, but they avoided to disclose the details about the exploit to give the D-Link the necessary time to solve the issue.
This family of network devices allows the storage of backup files, including logs, firmware and configuration files, in the device’s flash memory or on a web server. Unfortunately, the system lacks of proper authorization and authentication mechanisms, allowing an attacker to access the stored backup files.
The experts discovered that file stored in the flash memory can be accessed remotely by simply knowing the IP address of the D-Link Switches. The exposition of information contained in the configuration files could give the attackers precious information on the targeted network, the attackers could also control internal traffic by compromising the D-Link Switches.
“Once the configuration file is accessed, all the details about the switch, including configuration, username, etc., can be obtained by the attacker. For example, the configuration can be uploaded on another switch (purchased from the market) to obtain the details. Log files reveal information about the clients that accessed the switch and other infrastructure-related information,” said Sood. “Compromising network switches can have disastrous consequences as the attacker can control the traffic flow.”
The duo of experts highlighted that also the root directory of the web server is easily accessible by hackers.
“Usually, when the backup option is selected, the log files and configuration file are stored on the flash drive. Logs are enabled by default in many versions, but a majority of administrators have backup configured so downloading these files is easy,” explained Sood.
Although the security vulnerability has been reported early October, D-Link hasn’t fixed it yet.
(Security Affairs – D-Link Switches, hacking)
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