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A 100,000-Router Botnet Is Feeding On a 5-Year-Old UPnP Bug In Broadcom Chips (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A recently discovered botnet has taken control of an eye-popping 100,000 home and small-office routers made from a range of manufacturers, mainly by exploiting a critical vulnerability that has remained unaddressed on infected devices more than five years after it came to light. Researchers from Netlab 360, who reported the mass infection late last week, have dubbed the botnet BCMUPnP_Hunter. The name is a reference to a buggy implementation of the Universal Plug and Play protocol built into Broadcom chipsets used in vulnerable devices. An advisory released in January 2013 warned that the critical flaw affected routers from a raft of manufacturers, including Broadcom, Asus, Cisco, TP-Link, Zyxel, D-Link, Netgear, and US Robotics. The finding from Netlab 360 suggests that many vulnerable devices were allowed to run without ever being patched or locked down through other means. Last week's report documents 116 different types of devices that make up the botnet from a diverse group of manufacturers. Once under the attackers' control, the routers connect to a variety of well-known email services. This is a strong indication that the infected devices are being used to send spam or other types of malicious mail.
In other news, water is wet.
Unless you want to follow that up with an article about a major ISP trying to pawn vulnerabilities in its own hardware off on its consumers, it isn't news.
How can I know if my router is one of them?
Suprise !
=insert maniacal laughter here=
My router is so old nobody has the instruction manual for it anymore.
"The botnet is run by criminals and instead of blaming the criminals, and the ineptitude of the law enforcement, the narrative has been to attack the job creators and the legitimate businesses. Broadcom has created thousands of jobs and has created millions of dollars for its shareholders. It would be really unfortunate if such stellar corporate performance is undone due to onerous job killing regulations by the Washington bureaucrats. We call for the government to catch the criminals and bring them to justice.
We also take this time to announce our new great business venture. We are getting into home building. We hope to make homes more affordable by removing useless things like locks and latches. They interfere with the aesthetics of the homes without significantly adding to the comfort and the utility of the home. Being the job creators, we implore the municipalities to do their job of law enforcement, so that we dont need these locks and latches and other security devices. As a publicly traded company, it is our mission to use other people's money to make huge load of profits, take as much as possible as executive compensation, throw some bones to the wall street and externalize as much of our costs as possible, because we are job creators."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Quite frankly, the inexpensive consumer-grade inkjet printers do a generally awful job of networking, across the board.
One of the big issues I've encountered is that almost all of the wi-fi enabled printers still only support the 2.4Ghz band, which tends to become very crowded with SSIDs if you're in a multi-story office or apartment complex. So not only can you struggle to get a wireless frequency that's usable and reliable, but often, the number of SSIDs exceeds the memory allocated to display them in a scrolling list on the printer's front panel! I've had HP DeskJet printers that would only let you select your own wireless SSID one out of every 2 or 3 times you did a scan for them, because there were too many in the list and it truncated a bunch of them.
I'm not sure why a wireless printer would require uPnP support enabled on a router though? As far as I've ever seen, the uPnP thing on the router only exists as an attempt to automate the process of opening firewall ports for applications that require them. With it disabled, you should still be able to get anything to work on your LAN by finding out what ports it actually uses to communicate with the outside world and manually port forwarding them to those devices, in your router.
(Disabling it doesn't stop your devices on your local network from doing automatic searches or scans. So for example, a printer driver should be able to auto-detect a new inkjet printer you connected to your LAN by probing for its MAC address, regardless of uPnP being enabled.)
2 years ago I switch my home network to ubiquity. So far.. no problems.
To support printing from mobile devices while away from home. Lets you print while on the go and grab it off your printer when you return home
uPnP is almost useless in that it automatically allows your OS that supports it to crack a hole into the real world right through your NAT firewall. I've always disabled it because it sounds like a security risk and ontop of that in many cases it was pretty buggy.
To support printing from mobile devices while away from home. Lets you print while on the go and grab it off your printer when you return home
You are willing to expose yourself to a serious security hole because you are unwilling to wait 5 minutes inside your own home for something to print?
How selfishly "I WANT IT NOW!" can you get?
This is old news. Right? I've been disabling this function on every router I've owned since reading that it is a security risk in 2008 or 2009.
Read the security report carefully. This is *not* a bug in "Broadcom chips". It is a bug that exists in an open-source package (miniupnp) that was used by certain vendors for their wireless routers. Please fight the FUD.
I don't worry about that cause i use google print services which doesn't do this lame UPnP bullshit. It creates a tunnel out to google's print services, your mobile device then connects to google's print services and pushes the print job though the tunnel.
And yes this kind of stuff does come in handy sometimes. Lets say you're mobile and purchase something and want a hard copy receipt or a printed ticket. You may or may not be able to go back at a later time and bring up that page to print it out. But with these mobile print services you just hit print, your job fires off though the internet back to your printer at home and your hard copy awaits your return be it hours or days later.
Yes of course you have to trust that your print job is passing though googles services, if you want to accept that, its up to you. But google's print services are just about the only way to get seamless OS wide printing on Android. You cannot map SMB shared printers to an android device, whats more such a setup would also require you to establish a VPN connection back to your home to talk to the SMB shared printer, something the average joe doesn't have the knowledge or care to do.
I transfered residence 3 years ago and naturally applied for a new Fibre connection, was suprised when I discovered that the new router freely supplied by the ISP had so many opened ports including UPnP port. I emailed my ISP on why this is open by default and how I can close it because there's no kill command on the shell console of the router, the usual answer is that this is beyond the job of the technician and I need to contact the programmers who built the router. The company who built this router is on the same region but different country. What's the best course of action now, whith this new UPnP issue popped up in tech news sites. I can probably buy a new router but there seems to be some hard coded keys and router MAC address which is related to my current ISP subscription.