A flaw could allow easy hack of LG Network-attached storage devices

Network-attached storage devices manufactured by LG Electronics are affected by a critical remote code execution vulnerability that could be exploited by attackers to gain full control of the devices.

The experts at the security firm VPN Mentor found a pre-auth remote command injection vulnerability that affects the majority of LG NAS device models.

“we found a way to hack into the system using a pre-authenticated remote command injection vulnerability, which can then allow us to do virtually everything including access the data and tamper with the user data and content.” states the blog post published by VPN Mentor.

“The vulnerability is a pre-auth remote command injection vulnerability found in the majority of LG NAS devices.”

The flaw ties the improper validation of the “password” parameter of the user login page for remote management, this means that a remote attacker can pass arbitrary system commands through this field.

“As we show in the video, you cannot simply log in with any random username and password. However, there lies a command injection vulnerability in the “password” parameter (you have to use an interceptor like burp). We can simply trigger this bug by adding to it.” continues the analysis.

“To add a new user, we can simply write a persistent shell called c.php by using:

;echo “” > /tmp/x2;sudo mv /tmp/x2 /var/www/c.php

Entering it as a password exploits the vulnerability.

Then, by passing the following command, we can “dump” the users:

echo “.dump user” | sqlite3 /etc/nas/db/share.db"

The experts explained that it is quite simple to dump all database data and add a new user. The experts noticed that LG uses the MD5 hash algorithm to protect passwords, this means that they can be easily cracked.

Below a video PoC of the hack that shows how to exploit the vulnerability to establish a shell on the vulnerable Network-attached storage device and use it to execute commands.

LG has not yet released a security update to address the flaw, for this reason, if you are using LG NAS devices do not expose them on the Internet and protect them with a firewall that will allow only connection from authorized IPs.

Users are also recommended to periodically look out for any suspicious activity by checking all registered usernames and passwords on their devices.

Let me suggest also to periodically check all registered users to detect any anomaly.

A few weeks ago, experts at VPN Mentor disclosed several issued in popular VPN services.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – LG Network-attached storage, 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”.