Consumer Routers Riddled With Unpatched Vulnerabilities - Threatwire

By Shannon Morse, ThreatWire

Shoutout to David on my Patreon for recommending this story. Nine different routers have a total of 226 potential vulnerabilities affecting them, including some of which that are fully updated to the latest firmware. These include brands like Asus, DLink, Netgear, TP Link, Synology, Linksys, AVM, and Edimax. The TP Link Archer AX6000 has 32 of the flaws, and Synology’s RT-2600AC has 30 flaws. Netgears Nighthawk AX12 has 29 issues. The ASUS ROG Rapture has 25. The DLink box has a vulnerability that allowed the researchers to gain local privileges and get shell access, eventually allowing them to extract the AES encryption key.

The vulnerabilities were discovered by IoT Inspector researchers in a partnership with CHIP magazine, and focused on small business and home user routers. In each case, a router was provided by the manufacturer, fully updated, and CHIP and IoT Inspector checked for 5000 CVEs and security flaws. They found many were still vulnerable to attacks including many attacks considered high risk. The problems associated with these vulnerabilities were common - problems like the router using an outdated linux kernel, using weak passwords for default, like Admin, having hardcoded creds in plain text.

In each manufacturers case, the brand did respond swiftly by offering fixes via firmware updates. In the case of Synology, the updates should also benefit other connected Synology devices. There are several ways you can circumvent potential attacks using these vulnerabilities (or any for that matter in terms of routers in general). Applying available security updates, enabling auto update, changing default passwords, disabling remote access, and disabling UPnP and WPS are recommended.

Router Security:

https://www.iot-inspector.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Chip-IoT-Inspector-Router-Sicherheit-Test.pdf
https://www.iot-inspector.com/blog/extracting-decryption-keys-dlink/
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/nine-wifi-routers-used-by-millions-were-vulnerable-to-226-flaws/
https://www.iot-inspector.com/blog/router-security-check-2021/