The router devices using embedded web-server known as RomPager which is used by more than 12 million home router devices are vulnerable to hackers attack. This vulnerability can provide hacker the access to the information of the traffic going from and to the home routers, and this also from all the leading manufacturers.
The major manufacturers like TP-link, D-link, Huawei, Zyxel, ZTE and lots of other ISP-owned gateways are exposed to this vulnerability. This flaw which has been detected by the Check points researchers have named the flaw as "Misfortune Cookie". They have reported this vulnerability to all the manufacturers and have got a response that the manufacturing companies will be pushing new patches and firmwares to the system in short time.
12 Million Home Routers In Danger
There is a great problem with the embedded devices security because it is up to the device owners to flash the new firmware to the device. And it has been detected that only a single packet f malicious HTTP cookie is to be sent to the RomPager vulnerable devices, so as to exploit the flaw. And this flaw can exploit the vulnerability causing corruption of memory and also allowing the attacker to gain the administrative access to this device.
We hope this is a game changing wakeup call. Certainly in terms of numbers, I don't remember a vulnerability released that had 12 million endpoints online since maybe Conficker in 2008. This is really, really bad and the incredibly slow update propagation chain makes it worse, said Shahar Tal, Malware and Vulnerability research manager with Check Point.
Shahar said that this vulnerable code was from 2002 and had been fixed in 2005. Tal told that Check Point had conducted this scan and had found more than 12 million devices that are exposed to this vulnerability and these devices are from all over the world consisting of 189 countries. Tal has also informed that of each country half the users are at risk.
Tal has also made it clear that even the solution firmware has been founded for covering this vulnerability but still it will take months and years before removing this flaw completely from all 189 countries around the world. This flaw has brought the residential routers under risk of attack and not only the traffic on internet is at risk of the attack but also are the devices like printers etc.
This vulnerability will not just cause the privacy violations but also they can provide a platform for further attacks and malwares to be created so they can be installed into the devices causing more destruction.
According to Check Point, The implications of these risks mean more than just a privacy violation they also set the stage for further attacks, such as installing malware on devices and making permanent configuration changes. This WAN-to-LAN free-crossing is also bypassing any firewall or isolation functionality previously provided by your gateway and breaks common threat models. For example, an attacker can try to access your home webcam (potentially using default credentials) or extract data from your business NAS backup drive.
So, the patches have been shared with the manufactures and now it has to been seen that in how much time these patches will be in use. But still we can say that embedded devices are under threat and can cause a lot of disturbance in the internet industry.
