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Suspected Mass Exploit Against Linksys E1000 / E1200 Routers

Published: 2014-02-12. Last Updated: 2014-02-12 14:35:02 UTC
by Johannes Ullrich (Version: 2)
5 comment(s)

Brett, who operates an ISP in Wyoming, notified us that he had a number of customers with compromissed Linksys routers these last couple of days. The routers, once compromissed, scan port 80 and 8080 as fast as they can (saturating bandwidth available). 

It is not clear which vulnerability is being exploited, but Brett eliminated weak passwords. E1200 routers with the latest firmware (2.0.06) appear to be immune agains the exploit used. E1000 routers are end-of-life and don't appear to have an immune firmware available.

As indicators, look for E1000/1200 routers which scan IP addresses sequentially on port 80/8080. Some of the routers may have modified DNS settings to point to Google's DNS server (8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4). 

If you have any insight, please let us know.

Update: The initial request sent by the exploited routers if they find port 80 or 8080 open is GET /HNAP1/ . HNAP is a REST based web service that can be used to administer these routers. It is possible that the exploited vulnerability is part of HNAP (it had problems in the past), or that HNAP is just used to fingerprint the router to select the right exploit to send.

 

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Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D.
SANS Technology Institute
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5 comment(s)
My next class:
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Comments

Might have something to do with this 0-day exploit
http://www.defensecode.com/public/DefenseCode_Broadcom_Security_Advisory.pdf
It's possible it's related to this issue, which was blogged about by one of my fellow researchers in May...

http://blog.spiderlabs.com/2013/05/under-the-hood-linksys-remote-command-injection-vulnerabilities.html
Yes. This is the kind of vulnerability that would come in play here. I just refined my honeypots a bit better so hopefully we will get an exploit captured soon.
Also, I have the E1000's and an E1200 that I bought when that research was being performed.

So, if you need some testing done, let me know and I will power them up.
I came across the following article: http://www.cert.pl/news/8019/langswitch_lang/en

It mentions recent malicious activity observed on home-based routers. Vulnerabilities are exploited on them to allow attackers to remotely change the DNS configuration and perform malicious redirections.

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