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A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers

zdnet.com

11–20 of 220 posts

Re: A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers

#11

>But despite adjusting firewall settings for over 100,000 users, Alexey says that only 50 users reached out via Telegram. A few said "thanks," but most were outraged. Have to wonder if those "outraged" users are ones who would have proactively fixed it themselves, or if they would've let their router happily continue to chug away as part of a botnet.

...he’s the grey-hat they deserve, but not the one they need right now...

or the one they need but not the one they deserve :)

Re: A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers

#12
post #2

The very last paragraph kinda makes me feel bad for MikroTik, but I'd like them to add an auto-update feature to their routers. Probably fix all these issues.

I have this functionality scripted for my mikrotik routers, and it emails me when it's updating.

Re: A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers

#13

>But despite adjusting firewall settings for over 100,000 users, Alexey says that only 50 users reached out via Telegram. A few said "thanks," but most were outraged. Have to wonder if those "outraged" users are ones who would have proactively fixed it themselves, or if they would've let their router happily continue to chug away as part of a botnet.

“I wanted to stay insecure dam it” - Them probably

Re: A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers

#14
post #2

The very last paragraph kinda makes me feel bad for MikroTik, but I'd like them to add an auto-update feature to their routers. Probably fix all these issues.

An "automatic" update that would potentially cause the router to reboot and bring down the network would go over very poorly with customers, even if it happens at 3 AM. A better solution would be automatically checking for updates, and then sending an e-mail notification to the address associated with the router's owner/sys admin. I "registered" my router and email address with Netgear about a year ago and I was shoc…

> An "automatic" update that would potentially cause the router to reboot and bring down the network would go over very poorly with customers, even if it happens at 3 AM.

Maybe the the trigger for the automatic reboot could be more complicated than just a time-based trigger. Something like

    Reboot when
        localtime > 2AM & 
        localtime 
Basically reboot unless the router detects the network is being used actively.

Re: A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers

#15

Devices at vulnerable routerOS version and not already compromised would not be vulnerable if the firewall was enabled. It's that simple. Not great that these boxes used to ship in this default state and I can _understand_ a home user unfamiliar with what they're dealing with but what reason is there for deploying infrastructure this way at an ISP or hospital or whatever org?

I think there's still a lot of blame on Mikrotik for having such bugs in their management service and other daemons. I explicitly opened up the winbox port to be able to remotely manage Mikrotik routers I deploy (I considered their VPN implementations to be an even higher attack surface), as did many other admins it seems.

The winbox protocol supposedly runs over TLS and requires a username/password before anything is possible so I thought it should be safe enough, but through this bug anyone can download any file with no authentication (and the user db was storing passwords in plaintext which certainly didn't help)!

The web server vulnerability, sshd vulnerability, the smbd vulnerability - all are their fault. Had they used standard, well-tested open source packages there would be no problems, but they had to write their own custom implementations of these protocols for "reasons". I hate to think how many remotely exploitable bugs are lurking in their ipsec implementation.

Re: A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers

#16

Devices at vulnerable routerOS version and not already compromised would not be vulnerable if the firewall was enabled. It's that simple. Not great that these boxes used to ship in this default state and I can _understand_ a home user unfamiliar with what they're dealing with but what reason is there for deploying infrastructure this way at an ISP or hospital or whatever org?

How long ago was it that Mikrotik shipped devices that listened on the WAN port? The Mikrotik hEX and RB3011 I bought last year most assuredly was not configured that way even though the version of ROS on them was many revisions out of date.

Re: A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers

#17
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An "automatic" update that would potentially cause the router to reboot and bring down the network would go over very poorly with customers, even if it happens at 3 AM. A better solution would be automatically checking for updates, and then sending an e-mail notification to the address associated with the router's owner/sys admin. I "registered" my router and email address with Netgear about a year ago and I was shoc…

> An "automatic" update that would potentially cause the router to reboot and bring down the network would go over very poorly with customers, even if it happens at 3 AM. Maybe the the trigger for the automatic reboot could be more complicated than just a time-based trigger. Something like Reboot when localtime > 2AM & localtime Basically reboot unless the router detects the network is being used actively.

Of course, if you're on vacation and relying on that router to be available for security cameras, an automatic firmware update that results in a bricked router can be more than a little disruptive.

Re: A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers

#18

>But despite adjusting firewall settings for over 100,000 users, Alexey says that only 50 users reached out via Telegram. A few said "thanks," but most were outraged. Have to wonder if those "outraged" users are ones who would have proactively fixed it themselves, or if they would've let their router happily continue to chug away as part of a botnet.

Security issues are tricky. Often making people aware of an issue is indistinguishable from having caused the issue.

Re: A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers

#19
post #2

The very last paragraph kinda makes me feel bad for MikroTik, but I'd like them to add an auto-update feature to their routers. Probably fix all these issues.

Unfortunately Mikrotik updates tend to change a lot of things and potentially cause issues. Recently the whole bridge implementation was rewritten which required config changes if you had anything beyond the basic bridge/port setup. And the last "stable" update was bricking certain models by making them unbootable. If they were applied automatically then there would be lots of broken routers...

Re: A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers

#20

>But despite adjusting firewall settings for over 100,000 users, Alexey says that only 50 users reached out via Telegram. A few said "thanks," but most were outraged. Have to wonder if those "outraged" users are ones who would have proactively fixed it themselves, or if they would've let their router happily continue to chug away as part of a botnet.

It’s an intrusion.

Would you be outraged if you came home one day and there was a plumber fixing your sink? “Oh hi, don’t worry about me, just fixing your sink. Let myself in, hope you don’t mind”

You didn’t even know your sink was leaky let alone called a plumber.

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