Critical Vulnerability Impacting Hotel Wifi Networks Uncovered
Posted on March 26, 2015 by Kara Dunlap in Security
A serious security hole affecting a popular Internet gateway device used in hotels and convention centers has been closed.
The vulnerability affects ANTlabs’ InnGate, which is designed for operating corporate visitor-based networks. According to security firm Cylance, the vulnerability can be exploited to allow an attacker to monitor or tamper with traffic to and from any hotel Wifi user’s connection and potentially gain access to a hotel’s property management system.
Cylance reports that 277 hotels, convention centers and data centers across 29 countries are affected. At its core, the vulnerability is due to a misconfigured rsync instance included in the InnGate firmware. If exploited, the attacker would have read/write access to the entire file system without authentication.
“CVE-2015-0932 gives an attacker full read and write access to the file system of an ANTLabs’ InnGate device,” explained Brian Wallace, senior researcher at Cylance, in a blog post. “Remote access is obtained through an unauthenticated rsync daemon running on TCP 873. Once the attacker has connected to the rsync daemon, they are then able to read and write to the file system of the Linux based operating system without restriction.”
“When an attacker gains full read and write access to a Linux file system, it’s trivial to then turn that into remote code execution,” he continued. “The attacker could upload a backdoored version of nearly any executable on the system and then gain execution control, or simply add an additional user with root level access and a password known to the attacker. Once full file system access is obtained, the endpoint is at the mercy of the attacker.”
If an attacker has compromised a vulnerable InnGate device at a hotel, obtained shell access via SSH and created an account for themselves with root access, they could run tcpdump and dump all network traffic going through the devices. This would allow an attacker to collect any plaintext communication sent through the gateway of the affected hotel or location, Wallace blogged.
“A slightly more sophisticated attacker could use a tool such as SSLStrip in order to attempt to downgrade the transport layer encryption in order to increase the amount of plaintext credentials gathered,” Wallace noted. “This attack gives the threat actor incredible leverage over their targets including making OpenSSL vulnerabilities easier to exploit.”
ANTlabs released a patch for the issue today. The vulnerable devices include:
- IG 3100 model 3100, model 3101
- InnGate 3.00 E-Series, 3.01 E-Series, 3.02 E-Series, 3.10 E-Series
- InnGate 3.01 G-Series, 3.10 G-Series
Hotel networks offer a potentially attractive target for cyber-espionage groups. Last year, an advanced persistent threat (APT) group was discovered targeting Wifi networks at hotels in Asia. In addition, the FBI and the Internet Crime Complaint Center warned in 2012 that attackers were targeting travelers abroad through malicious pop-up windows when they established an Internet connection in their hotel rooms.
“While the DarkHotel campaign was clearly carried out by an advanced threat actor with a large number of resources, CVE-2015-0932 is a very simple vulnerability with devastating impact,” Wallace wrote. “The severity of this issue is escalated by how little sophistication is required for an attacker to exploit it.”
Brian Prince is a Contributing Writer for SecurityWeek.
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Network Vision Fixes Code Injection Vulnerability in IntraVUE Software
Posted on February 27, 2015 by Kara Dunlap in Security
Organizations that use the IntraVUE network visualization software from Network Vision are advised to update their installations as soon as possible because older versions of the solution are plagued by a critical vulnerability.
A code injection flaw (CVE-2015-0977) has been found in IntraVUE by Jürgen Bilberger from Daimler TSS GmbH, a security researcher who has discovered and reported vulnerabilities in several industrial control system (ICS) products over the past years.
According to an advisory from ICS-CERT, a remote, unauthenticated attacker can exploit the vulnerability to execute arbitrary operating system commands that could impact the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of affected servers.
This is a high-severity vulnerability with a CVSS base score of 10. Even an attacker with low skill could leverage the bug, but there is no evidence that an exploit is publicly available, ICS-CERT noted.
The security hole affects all Windows versions of IntraVUE prior to 2.3.0a14. The issue has been addressed with the release of IntraVUE 2.3.0a14 on February 9. In the meantime, Network Vision also released version 2.3.0a16, which brings some functionality improvements.
“It is recommended that the new version be applied as soon as possible. Users who have software support contracts with Network Vision can upgrade to the newest version at no cost,” reads the advisory from ICS-CERT.
Network Vision is a Newburyport, Massachusetts-based company that provides industrial Ethernet solutions for sectors such as automation, critical manufacturing, transportation, and water systems.
IntraVUE, the company’s flagship product, is designed to provide Ethernet device visualization and enable organizations to quickly identify issues affecting devices deployed in distributed and hostile environments. The solution can be used to identify duplicate MAC and IP addresses, connection or application faults, device or cable moves, and unauthorized connections.
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