Hacking

Roughly 500,000 Ubiquiti devices may be affected by flaw already exploited in the wild

Security experts identified nearly 500,000 Ubiquit devices that may be affected by a vulnerability that has already been exploited in the wild.

Security experts are warning Ubiquit users of a vulnerability that has already been exploited in the wild.

Last week, the researcher Jim Troutman, consultant and director of the Northern New England Neutral Internet Exchange (NNENIX), revealed that threat actors had been targeting Ubiquiti installs exposed online. Remote attackers were targeting the networking devices exposed via a discovery service accessible on UDP port 10001.

According to the expert, the devices are affected by a DoS flaw that attackers were attempting to trigger.

The vulnerability is not a novelty in the security and Ubiquiti communities, in June the issue was discussed in a thread on the Ubiquiti forums where users were warning of a possible exploit used in the wild.

Now security experts at Rapid7 revealed that they were monitoring suspicious traffic destined for port 10001 for at least one year.

Ubiquiti is aware of the issue and is currently working on a firmware update that will address it anyway it is trying to downplay it.

“There has been some discussion lately about a bug in airOS which can result in management access to airOS devices becoming inoperable until these devices are rebooted. This issue appears to be caused by external access to airOS devices using port 10001. As a temporary workaround for this issue while it is being investigated and resolved by the development team, network operators can block port 10001 at the network perimeter.” reads the advisory published by Ubiquit.

“To our current knowledge, this issue cannot be used to gain control of network devices or to create a DDoS attack.” 

Waiting for a fix, Ubiquiti recommends blocking UDP port 10001, but this solution could have a disruptive effect on some services.

Scanning the Internet for vulnerable devices using the Rapid7’s Sonar project, experts found roughly 490,000 devices exposed online. Most of the vulnerable Ubiquiti devices are located in Brazil, followed by the United States, and Spain.

“By decoding the responses, we are able to learn about the nature of these devices and clues as to how or why they are exposed publicly.” continues Rapid7. For example, by grouping by the model names returned by these responses, we see big clusters around all sorts of Ubiquiti models/devices:”

Productn
NanoStation172,563
AirGrid131,575
LiteBeam43,673
PowerBeam40,092

The analysis of the names of the device revealed that in 17,000 cases they contain the string “HACKED-ROUTER-HELP-SOS,” a circumstance that suggests that they have already been hacked by exploiting other vulnerabilities.

Rapid7 reported its findings to US-CERT, CERT Brazil, and of course Ubiquiti.

[adrotate banner=”9″] [adrotate banner=”12″]

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – hacking, Ubiquiti)

[adrotate banner=”5″]

[adrotate banner=”13″]

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”.

Recent Posts

New Triada Trojan comes preinstalled on Android devices<gwmw style="display:none;"></gwmw>

A new Triada trojan variant comes preinstalled on Android devices, stealing data on setup, warn…

1 hour ago

New advanced FIN7’s Anubis backdoor allows to gain full system control on Windows

FIN7 cybercrime group has been linked to Anubis, a Python-based backdoor that provides remote access…

9 hours ago

U.S. CISA adds Apache Tomcat flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog<gwmw style="display:none;"></gwmw>

U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds Apache Tomcat flaw to its Known Exploited…

16 hours ago

Apple backported fixes for three actively exploited flaws to older devices

Apple backports three critical vulnerabilities actively exploited in attacks against older iOS and macOS models.…

21 hours ago

Spike in Palo Alto Networks scanner activity suggests imminent cyber threats

Hackers are scanning for vulnerabilities in Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect portals, likely preparing for targeted…

23 hours ago

Microsoft warns of critical flaw in Canon printer drivers

Microsoft’s offensive security team discovered a critical code execution vulnerability impacting Canon printer drivers.  Researchers…

1 day ago