Researchers have discovered 16 types of vulnerabilities, including many backdoors, in Zyxel’s CloudCNM SecuManager network management software. The vendor has confirmed the flaws and says it’s working on patches.
Zyxel CloudCNM SecuManager provides a console that organizations can use to monitor and manage their security gateways, including on internal and global networks.
Researcher Pierre Kim reported last week that the software is affected by many potentially serious vulnerabilities. The security holes were discovered in December by Kim and Alexandre Torres, but they were not reported to the vendor before disclosure as the researchers believe some of the backdoors were placed intentionally.
Following the disclosure of the flaws, Zyxel published an advisory confirming that its product is affected by more than a dozen vulnerabilities, mostly related to hardcoded credentials and missing authentication. The company said its investigation determined that only CloudCNM SecuManager is impacted.
“CloudCNM SecuManager is co-developed with a third-party vendor. Zyxel has taken immediate action to work with the vendor to resolve the issues, making this our top priority. We’ll reach out to individual customers to roll out the solution once it becomes available,” Zyxel said in its advisory.
Kim and Torres discovered that CloudCNM SecuManager by default uses hardcoded SSH server keys, allowing an attacker to intercept and decrypt traffic. They also found the use of several static accounts for MySQL and easily obtainable passwords for admin and user accounts.
They also identified hardcoded credentials that are used for communications between an appliance and the cloud management system.
Other issues include cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws in the web interface, the lack of authentication and clear text communications for some components, and the lack of protection for files containing passwords and other potentially sensitive information. Some of the vulnerabilities discovered by Kim and Torres can allow remote code execution without authentication.
Zyxel recently released patches for several network-attached storage (NAS) devices and firewalls affected by a critical remote code execution vulnerability for which an exploit had been sold on underground cybercrime forums before fixes were made available. Some of the firewalls affected by this flaw can be managed using the CloudCNM SecuManager product.
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