More than 1,700 valid Telnet credentials for IoT devices leaked online

Security researchers are warning of the availability online of a list of IoT devices and associated telnet credentials.

The list has been available on Pastebin since June, but last week it was also shared via Twitter by the researcher Ankit Anubhav becoming rapidly viral.

The original list was posted by someone who has previously published a dump of valid log-in credentials and also the source code of a botnet.

It is a gift for hackers, more than 1,700 IoT devices could easily take over and recruit them part of a botnet that could be used to power a DDoS attack.

The list has more than 22,000 views as of Saturday afternoon, while only 1,000 users have seen it since last Thursday.

Many IoT devices included in the list have default and well-known credentials (i.e., admin:admin, root:root, or no authentication required).

Top five credentials were:

root:[blank]—782
admin:admin—634
root:root—320
admin:default—21
default:[blank]—18

The popular researcher Victor Gevers, the founder of the GDI Foundation, analyzed the list and confirmed it is composed of more than 8200 unique IP addresses, about 2.174 are accessible via Telnet with the leaked credentials.

According to the researchers, most of the reachable IPs (61 percent) were located in China.

The list of the 33,000 IP addresses includes many duplicates, it is likely they were already abused by hackers in the wild.

The Pastebin also includes numerous scripts, titled “Easy To Root Kit,” “Mirai Bots,” “Mirai-CrossCompiler,” “Apache Struts 2 RCE Auto-Exploiter v2),” “Slowloris DDoS Attack Script.”

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – IoT devices, hacking)

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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”.