Backdoor Found In Arcadyan-based Wi-Fi Routers 59
Mojo66 writes "A recently reported flaw that allowed an attacker to drastically reduce the number of attempts needed to guess the WPS PIN of a wireless router isn't necessary for some Arcadyan based routers anymore. According to German computer publisher Heise, some 100,000 routers of type Speedport W921V, W504V and W723V are affected in Germany alone. (Google translation, original here.) What makes things worse is the fact that in order to exploit the backdoor, no button has to be pushed on the device itself and on some of the affected routers, the backdoor PIN ("12345670") is still working even after WPS has been disabled by the user. The only currently known remedy for those models is to disable Wi-Fi altogether. Since all Arcadyan routers share the same software platform, more models might be affected."
CPE is a nightmare... (Score:5, Interesting)
Overall, the "Customer Premises Equipment" or CPE in industry parlance, aka the user's NAT/home router and associated WiFi, is a nightmare of bad design and forever day bugs.
With Netalyzr we have been starting to probe for information about the CPE: we use UPnP to try to identify the NAT and we also do DNS queries that may indicate what software is running. The resulting picture, which we've only started to analyze, is dismal. We see NATs which are running versions of DNSmasq that were released in 2003/2004! So almost decade-old code that just never ever ever got upgraded.