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.”

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