Number: IRCNE2014122402
Date: 2014/12/20
According to “techworld”, researchers at Check Point have discovered a serious security vulnerability affecting at least 12 million leading-brand home and SME routers that appears to have gone unnoticed for over a decade.
Dubbed the ‘Misfortune Cookie’ flaw, the firm plans to give a detailed account of the issue at a forthcoming security conference but in the meantime it’s important to stress that no real-world attacks using it have yet been detected.
That said, an attacker exploiting the flaw would be able to monitor all data travelling through a gateway such as files, emails and logins and have the power to infect connected devices with malware. Man-in-the-middle attacks would also be possible, according to Check Point.
The precise source of the issue is not known - a chipset software development kit (SDK) is suspected – but Check Point warned that up to 200 unpatched models using the RomPager embedded web server software (which uses a remote service called TR-069) prior to version 4.34 were probably vulnerable.
Given the popularity of RomPager and the list of affected brands - D-Link, Edimax, Huawei, TP-Link, ZTE, and ZyXEL sold mainly to home users – such pessimism is realistic.
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