Flash attack could take over your router
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Security researchers have released code showing how a pair of widely used technologies could be misused to take control of a victim&#39;s Web browsing experience.The code, published over the weekend by researchers Adrian Pastor and Petko Petkov, exploits features in two technologies: The UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) protocol, which is used by many operating systems to make it easier for them to work with devices on a network, and Adobe Systems&#39; Flash multimedia software.By tricking a victim into viewing a malicious Flash file, an attacker could use UPnP to change the primary DNS server used by the router to find other computers on the Internet. This would give the attacker a virtually undetectable way to redirect the victim to fake Web sites. For example, a victim with a compromised router could be taken to the attacker&#39;s Web server, even if he typed Citibank.com directly into the Web browser navigation bar.&quot;The most malicious of all malicious things is to change the primary DNS server,&quot; the researchers wrote. &quot;That will effectively turn the router and the network it controls into a zombie which the attacker can take advantage of whenever they feel like it.&quot;Because so many routers support UPnP, the researchers believe that &quot;99 percent of home routers are vulnerable to this attack.&quot;In fact, many other types of UPnP devices, such as printers, digital entertainment systems, and cameras are also potentially at risk, they added in a Frequently Asked Questions Web page explaining their research.The attack is particularly worrisome because it is cross-platform -- any operating system that supports Flash is susceptible -- and because it is based on features of UPnP and Flash, not bugs that could be easily fixed by Adobe or the router vendors.Users could avoid this attack by turning UPnP off on their routers, where it is normally enabled by default, but this would cause a variety of popular applications, such as IM software, games, and Skype, to break and require manual configuration on the router.Adobe could make changes to Flash to mitigate the problem, but attackers could most likely also launch this attack using another technique, known as DNS pinning, said Aviv Raff, a researcher who has also blogged about the attack.&quot;This is a critical issue,&quot; he said in an IM interview. &quot;People should turn off UPnP in their devices, and vendors should put UPnP disabled by default in the devices they deliver.&quot;Although this could make life difficult for nontechnical users, Raff believes it would be worth the effort. &quot;It&#39;s better than having your traffic owned by malicious people,&quot; he said.However, another security expert said that turning off UPnP would be overkill, considering that online criminals have not even begun using this attack. &quot;Look... if you get hit by a meteor, it&#39;s devastating,&quot; said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with Grisoft. &quot;But no one goes around building meteor shelters.&quot;
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Ability to change the settings of poorly configured home routers could put home networks at risk of serious attack.
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Networked multifunction devices share PC vulnerabilities to worms, hackers.
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If criminals were to target unsecured wireless routers, they could create an attack that could piggyback across thousands of Wi-Fi networks in urban areas like Chicago or New York City, according to researchers at Indiana University.The researchers estimate that a Wi-Fi attack could take over 20,000 wireless routers in New York City within a two-week period, with most of the infections occurring within the first day.&quot;The issue is that most of these routers are installed out of the box very insecurely,&quot; said Steven Myers, an assistant professor at Indiana University, who published the paper in November, along with researchers from the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Torino, Italy,The researchers theorize that attack would work by guessing administrative passwords and then instructing the routers to install new worm-like firmware, which would in turn cause the infected router to attack other devices in its range.Because there are so many closely connected Wi-Fi networks in most urban areas, the attack could hop from router to router for many miles in some cities.The team used what is known as the Susceptible Infected Removed (SIR) model to track the growth of this attack. This methodology is typically used to estimate things like influenza outbreaks, but it has also been used to predict things like computer virus infections, Myers said.Although the researchers did not develop any attack code that would be used to carry out this infection, they believe it would be possible to write code that guessed default passwords by first entering the default administrative passwords that shipped with the router, and then by trying a list of one million commonly used passwords, one after the other. They believe that 36 percent of passwords can be guessed using this technique.Even some routers that use encryption could be cracked, if they use the popular WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) algorithm, which security experts have been able to crack for years now. Routers that were encrypted using the more-secure WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) standard were considered impossible to infect, Myers said.Myers&#39; model is based on data compiled from the Wireless Geographic Logging Engine (WiGLE), a volunteer-run effort to map Wi-Fi networks around the world, which has over 10 million networks in its database.Using this data, they were able to map out large networks of made out of Wi-Fi routers that were each no more than 45 meters (49 yards) from the network -- in other words, close enough for an infection to spread. The largest such network in New York included 36,807 systems; in Boston it was 15,899; and in Chicago: 50,084.Because New York is such a dense city with a relatively low percentage (25.8 percent, according to the researchers) of encrypted routers, it was particularly susceptible to this type of attack. San Francisco, on the other hand, where 40.1 percent of routers are encrypted and which had a lower density of routers was less susceptible.Myers says that because the attack would be technically complex, he doubts that criminals will attempt it any time soon. There are simply too many other, easier ways to take over computers, he said.Still, he thinks hardware makers should take note. &quot;The bigger point for developers and people making wireless information technology is to realize that there are serious security issues.&quot;
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In one of the most significant hack attempts of the past few years, attackers tried to take down key parts of the Internet by targeting critical routing servers.
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InfoWorld - Online attackers have briefly disrupted service on at least two of the 13 &quot;root&quot; servers that are used to direct traffic on the Internet.
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Adobe Systems Inc. has released fixes for three critical vulnerabilities in Flash Player that could let hackers infect Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems.
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Researchers in the U.S. say they've successfully shown how attackers could compromise a network designed to make it harder to trace Web sites they are viewing.
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A London security analyst working with the open source group GNUCitizen has discovered a potentially serious exploit that could affect users of the Firefox browser and Apple's QuickTime movie and music player - especially iTunes customers - on Windows XP-based machines. BetaNews tested and verified the severity of the exploit.
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Single Packet Authorization fills the gaps in port knocking.
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In brief Exploit circulating for unpatched vuln
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Surfing the Web has never been more risky. Simply connecting to the Internet - and doing nothing else - exposes your PC to non-stop, automated break-in attempts by intruders looking to take control of your machine surreptitiously.
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Blog: Phishing and drive-by downloads are possible if you stumble across an infected profile.
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SAN JOSE, Calif.) - Phreaks, spoofers and spammers want to invade your home computer, and the tricks of their trade include airsnarfs, wabbits and fork bombs.
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Multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in version five of the widely-used Kerberos authentication protocol. The most serious could be exploited by crackers to gain root control to authentication servers.
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Third-party fix plugs a recently discovered browser flaw that's increasingly being exploited in cyberattacks.
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Internet Security Systems' intrusion prevention software on Crossbeam Systems security switches.