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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.
A) Do you have UPnP enabled.
B) If yes, turn it off.
UPnP is an *UTTERLY UNNECESSARY* service (speaking as an IT Manager, gamer, and someone who hosts gaming servers etc.), that when exposed to the Internet allows ANY local device to forward ANY network port to ANY IP/port combination with NO authentication whatsoever.
Even privileged ports and local ports.
I can literally redirect your port 139 (e.g. CIFS/SMB) to a host on the Internet if I wanted, or open command/control ports and punch holes through your firewall wherever I want.
All this is is a UPnP flaw that allows you to do the same remotely, but literally any device on your local network can already do it without any logs, authentication, or notification that they are doing so (e.g. your ChromeCast / laptop / Amazon Echo / Nest doorbell could be opening up your telnet port and sending it to themselves once every hour, and you'd pretty much never know anything about it).
Turn it off. Watch how nothing changes and all your systems still work as intended.
And, if you absolutely, 100% must host servers on your own connection (not just "play games" but literally host servers with no matchmaking servers present) then you add a single port-forward yourself and job-done.
P.S. No, this does not affect local device discovery, etc. so your Chromecast etc. will still work perfectly fine on your home network anyway.
Case in point: I've never had UPnP turned on on anything, I have 1000 Steam games that play just fine, plus ChromeCasts and all kinds of kit. Not a single problem.
Quite a few wireless inkjet printers need it and WPS to connect to a network. Cannons for instance.
The list is copied to the comments on the first Ars link in the article. https://arstechnica.com/inform...
The source is said to be a pdf on the Netlab 360 site which is currently very slow to respond.
A copy of the list will not post here because it is too few characters per line to get past the spam checker.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
"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.)
Also, UPnP is just another extreme fuckup by Microsoft.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
No.
They don't.
And if they do, stop buying them.
But they don't.
Literally, it's "auto-port-forwarding". Any printer that NEEDS that, you don't want. Not even Google Cloud Print requires that.
WPS is entirely unrelated.
UPnP "Discovery" over the local network is entirely unrelated (and not affected by turning off UPnP on the router) - that's the only mention of UPnP that I can find on any of Canon's sites... they are talking about allowing UPnP through the software firewall on a client machine so it can talk over the local network - NOT on the router at all.
The only way to use UPnP - turn it off! It's a security hole the size of Grand Canyon.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
In case you aren't joking, upnp is "Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is a set of networking protocols that permits networked devices, such as personal computers, printers, Internet gateways, Wi-Fi access points and mobile devices to seamlessly discover each other's presence on the network and establish functional network services"
It is completely different from plug and play discover of devices within your machine. It is basically a protocol that lets malware, worms, etc forward ports for themselves in your router. The entire protocol is a massive security bug implemented across pretty much all consumer routers because of a combination of software vendors not bothering to document needed ports, being too lazy to actually maintain consistency and a small footprint on ports, and people being too dumb to educate themselves on how to open ports.
Sadly, many console gaming systems just assume you are running it and play fast and loose on ports, requiring people to run completely unsecured or not fully enjoy their console.
For those of us who don't game, the choice has always been simple, just say no to upnp.
"Case in point: I've never had UPnP turned on on anything, I have 1000 Steam games that play just fine, plus ChromeCasts and all kinds of kit. Not a single problem."
This is probably true today. Games are now designed to work without it. However, back when upnp was introduced it was the only reasonable way for non-network admins to get a hole through their firewall. And yes, it was necessary just to play online, not only for hosting.
As an it manager, you probably ought to know this already. Some legacy software won't work without it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Routers with vulnerable Broadcom UPnP stack are mostly based on Broadcom chipset. You can check how many manufacturers use Broadcom chipset here (search for Broadcom, brcm or bcm).
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
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.
Did they finally get in compliance with the GPL? I don't remember hearing about it/following the story recently, but I recall that being a sticking point the last time I was looking at routers as they had been...obfuscating it for a while.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
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.