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Time Warner Cable Modems Expose Users
eldavojohn writes "Wired is reporting on a simple hack putting some 65,000 customers at risk. The hack to gain administrative access to the cable modem/router combo is remarkably simple: '[David] Chen, founder of a software startup called Pip.io, said he was trying to help a friend change the settings on his cable modem and discovered that Time Warner had hidden administrative functions from its customers with Javascript code. By simply disabling Javascript in his browser, he was able to see those functions, which included a tool to dump the router's configuration file. That file, it turned out, included the administrative login and password in cleartext. Chen investigated and found the same login and password could access the admin panels for every router in the SMC8014 series on Time Warner's network — a grave vulnerability, given that the routers also expose their web interfaces to the public-facing internet.' If you use Time Warner's SMC8014 series cable modem/Wi-Fi router combo, watch for firmware to be released soon that they are reportedly in the process of testing."
...is to put them in bridge mode and use your own router (no matter who your provider is). Same with DSL modems. Even when they aren't misconfigured (deliberately or due to sheer incompetence) the firmware is usually buggy and limited.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
While I agree with you, the issue usually isn't the small percentage of technically savvy people who use this, but rather the majority of folks looking to "plug and play". These are the security gaps that allow zombie DDoS attacks to happen so easily, as they open up easy access to lot's of similarly configured boxes.
Convenience and incompetence. They want to be able to run scripts to update/reconfigure all the modems and this is the first method that occured to them. Being stupid, they didn't think it through.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This isn't just a security vulnerability - those things happen. This is gross negligence. There are 3 simultaneous absolutely bone-headed things here:
- PUBLIC facing web configuration? I have never, ever, ever, seen a router that did that. Not even cheesy home routers.
- JAVASCRIPT is their security? That was dumb back in 1998, but who does that now?
- CLEAR TEXT username/password? There was this great technique we used back in 1975 called hashing. Look it up. Why does it even write the username/password out anyway?
This is one of those cases of just too many stupid things all at once for it to be a mistake.
I was under the impression that the only user-configurable option is to add URLs to a blocking list. There is no way to put it in bridge mode, and even if it was someone could log on and change it, and simply pass all your data to their servers anyway.
This is the kind of setup you give people who don't know about security, so they can't muck it up. Of course, it needs to be secure in the first place, so this is a huge issue and fixable only with firmware (or different hardware).
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Yes incompetence looks like the primary cause here. Whoever hides the access to administrative functions of anything by simple javascript on a web page should be at best fired.
It is quite amazing to see how many programmers are just totally clueless about the technology they're using. It's just appauling.
Bridge mode is just that -- it's a connection between two separate networks. In this case, the TW box is connected to the Internet and is one point of the bridge. On the other end is your home network router, which acts as the other point of the bridge. Your network is physically separate from theirs, and joined by the single patch cable between the boxes.. This is usually how these things work anyways, even when it's all in one box. The difference here is that you're using two physical boxes to ensure the separation, which avoids absurd goofs like the one described in TFA.