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Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

krebsonsecurity.com

361–370 of 815 posts

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#361

This company is a disaster it seems, and I have just setup my whole home infrastructure and home security aound their products... They where the most recommended brand when I was shopping for new stuff a year ago.

Are you me?

Just finished setting up my Ubiquiti-based home network that includes a dream machine, 6 access-points, and a wireless bridge to an outbuilding. All told about a $1,500 investment I made because I thought I was investing in "best-in-class" hardware and software.

Sigh.

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#362
post #7

> “The breach was massive, customer data was at risk, access to customers’ devices deployed in corporations and homes around the world was at risk.” > “They were able to get cryptographic secrets for single sign-on cookies and remote access, full source code control contents, and signing keys exfiltration,” Maybe putting your network control plane in 'the cloud' isn't such a good idea after all... Edit: Just re-read…

Was shopping for alternatives to my Ubiquiti last night. Seems like there is nothing good out there. Engenius has shit hardware and a cloud controller. Aruba has a cloud controller AND you have to pay for a license. Cisco makes you pay for a license. TP-Link is cloud-based. WTF. Does anyone have a decent WAP where I can use PoE, deploy like 5 of them and have them support roaming between APs, all managed locally? Is…

Disclaimer: worked for Meraki (now Cisco Meraki) for several years.

Generally, halfway decent wireless APs are all targeted at the enterprise market. Consumer hardware is a brutal race to the bottom, as lay consumers aren't qualified to compare options based on anything but price and UI. Ubiquiti was an outlier in trying to bring enterprise features to the consumer market

The problem for enthusiasts and small business/home office setups like yours are that both the enterprise market (e.g. Meraki) and the premium consumer market (e.g. Google WiFi) focus heavily on ease of management - cloud controllers are table stakes these days, not a controversial feature. Part of that premium that Meraki, Aruba, and that class of enterprise supplier charge is about having a trustworthy and secured backend.

Note, however, that roaming between APs is a feature of the 802.11 standard; you just need to have all your APs on the same layer 2 (802.x) network, and using the same SSID and credentials. No fancy hardware required, and you can even mix and match vendors.

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look into Mikrotik hardware and OpenWRT. Of the Mikrotik-based hardware I'm familiar with, they support PoE. OpenWRT supports roaming and mesh networks, and is a local solution, as opposed to a cloud-based one. There are no licenses you need to pay for, either.

Mikrotik is amazing, for what you get. But of a learning curve but worth the effort, I've seen large scale wireless networks crossing mountains with their kit.

I am not a fan of Mikrotik, the UI is not nice and the defaults are not smart. I have seen professionals make mistakes on them several times.

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#364
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was shopping for alternatives to my Ubiquiti last night. Seems like there is nothing good out there. Engenius has shit hardware and a cloud controller. Aruba has a cloud controller AND you have to pay for a license. Cisco makes you pay for a license. TP-Link is cloud-based. WTF. Does anyone have a decent WAP where I can use PoE, deploy like 5 of them and have them support roaming between APs, all managed locally? Is…

So the question for becomes: is there just not a good enthusiast market for this stuff? I have met a number of people who are "network nerds", so I'm inclined to think the market does exist. With any of the plethora of consumer devices (Linksys, Netgear, D-Link) it's a dice roll whether your gear is complete garbage or not. A lot of the time, you're coming up snake eyes. I've got some Ubiquiti gear I bought a couple…

I think the enthusiasts still buy tiny PC's with Wifi cars and run Linux/FreeBSD/whatever.

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#365
post #7

> “The breach was massive, customer data was at risk, access to customers’ devices deployed in corporations and homes around the world was at risk.” > “They were able to get cryptographic secrets for single sign-on cookies and remote access, full source code control contents, and signing keys exfiltration,” Maybe putting your network control plane in 'the cloud' isn't such a good idea after all... Edit: Just re-read…

Was shopping for alternatives to my Ubiquiti last night. Seems like there is nothing good out there. Engenius has shit hardware and a cloud controller. Aruba has a cloud controller AND you have to pay for a license. Cisco makes you pay for a license. TP-Link is cloud-based. WTF. Does anyone have a decent WAP where I can use PoE, deploy like 5 of them and have them support roaming between APs, all managed locally? Is…

[deleted]

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#366
post #7

> “The breach was massive, customer data was at risk, access to customers’ devices deployed in corporations and homes around the world was at risk.” > “They were able to get cryptographic secrets for single sign-on cookies and remote access, full source code control contents, and signing keys exfiltration,” Maybe putting your network control plane in 'the cloud' isn't such a good idea after all... Edit: Just re-read…

Was shopping for alternatives to my Ubiquiti last night. Seems like there is nothing good out there. Engenius has shit hardware and a cloud controller. Aruba has a cloud controller AND you have to pay for a license. Cisco makes you pay for a license. TP-Link is cloud-based. WTF. Does anyone have a decent WAP where I can use PoE, deploy like 5 of them and have them support roaming between APs, all managed locally? Is…

Maybe a bit too soon, but has anyone tried Maxwell? https://www.crowdsupply.com/andy-haas/maxwell

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#367
post #320

Don’t have time to dig into this right now, but I have a Ubiquiti WiFi AP at my home behind a NAT; does this breach mean my home network is vulnerable/effectively exposed to the Internet? Do I need to log off HN and deal with this now, or can it wait?

It depends. How do you manage said AP? The leaked credentials issue here is specifically in SSO Cloud authentication to Controllers, which are used to administer all the actual hardware devices. However, the devices themselves aren't affected. So depending on how, or for that matter if, you manage them you may be unaffected as well which has always been a major touted advantage of UniFi and has indeed proved true rig…

Thanks the detailed reply. As you correctly inferred, this is my situation:

>Your post seems to imply you have just that AP and that's it?

I recently moved to a house with a preexisting network, so I have only the AP itself set up with the Ubiquiti router/network controller still in storage. I use the mobile app to configure the AP. It sounds like the AP won’t phone home or open tunnels to their cloud by itself, so I’ll turn it back on for now.

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The early days at Ubiquiti were good. I worked with a lot of good engineers and we shipped good work. The decline is a recent problem. > How the brand hasn't become toxic already is a mystery to me, yet look at the stock price tracker. It's been trending up for years and it has well over doubled in the past six months alone. This is your answer. No incentive to change. All of the bad engineering decisions have been r…

>I heard rumors that the CEO was making two separate teams work [. . .] separately, competing against each other. I don't work in tech, so maybe I'm dumb to this, but why would you ever do this?

Isn't Oracle notorious for doing this?

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#369
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was shopping for alternatives to my Ubiquiti last night. Seems like there is nothing good out there. Engenius has shit hardware and a cloud controller. Aruba has a cloud controller AND you have to pay for a license. Cisco makes you pay for a license. TP-Link is cloud-based. WTF. Does anyone have a decent WAP where I can use PoE, deploy like 5 of them and have them support roaming between APs, all managed locally? Is…

So the question for becomes: is there just not a good enthusiast market for this stuff? I have met a number of people who are "network nerds", so I'm inclined to think the market does exist. With any of the plethora of consumer devices (Linksys, Netgear, D-Link) it's a dice roll whether your gear is complete garbage or not. A lot of the time, you're coming up snake eyes. I've got some Ubiquiti gear I bought a couple…

As a former enthusiast in this area, I need the time for other more pressing interests and have reverted my home network to Eeros pinned to an IQrouter. All of them require some central service to operate, and I rarely if ever have to pay any attention to them. They also provide better coverage and less radio interference than the prior gold standard, Apple Airport devices. The IQ runs some sort of ssh *nix variant and the only time I’ve ever had to call Eero support was to turn off 5GHz for a minute^ to pair a smarthome device.

Still, it’s nice to have a hobby, and if you’re looking for one, run your own, sure! No shame in that. But it’s no longer necessary, and that’s pretty swell to me.

^ I agree with why they don’t make that accessible to end users: because people will uselessly fiddle with settings knobs to feel empowered, knobs like “separate 2.4 and 5 networks” (which breaks roaming and makes users incorrectly blame their WiFi routers when PEBCAK is at fault) that semi-expert users feel qualified to mess with, and lazy technicians will use to create “guest” networks that don’t offer protection and perform miserably due to being locked to 5GHz.

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#370
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I heard rumors that the CEO was making two separate teams work [. . .] separately, competing against each other. I don't work in tech, so maybe I'm dumb to this, but why would you ever do this?

I imagine it comes from some flawed business belief in the survival of the fittest. I've never heard a tech person advocate for it, I only ever hear it from business types.

Of the things I've seen reportedly happening at Ubiquiti, that one makes more sense than some.

Businesses put projects out to tender all the time, and other businesses that can provide what is wanted invest sometimes very considerable resources into putting in a bid, knowing that if they don't make the winning bid then those resources will mostly likely be completely wasted. Evidently it is still worth operating a business on that basis because the benefits when you do win outweigh the costs of the failed bids, and those costs might include reducing morale in a team who worked on a failed bid.

If that is the case across industries as a whole then economically it might make sense for a business to operate on the same basis internally for their Next Big Thing. Run multiple independent teams at the start, give them all the same brief, then see which team comes up with the most promising starting point. I don't see much of an argument for continuing the internal competition beyond the concept to prototype stage, though, unless perhaps it turned out that more than one team could produce a product that was viable in its own right without competing for the same market.

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