Attackers have exploited a recently disclosed critical zero-day bug to compromise and infect more than 10,000 Cisco IOS XE devices with malicious implants.
If a fresh deployment isn’t secure out of the box, that’s definitely on cisco. There’s a lot of people out there who just plug in some hardware and then use the GUI to configure it. Just because it’s best practice to turn it off, doesn’t mean everyone is skilled enough to do so.
We did have one compromised router from this at work, a fresh deploy that someone did a while ago and then the project got put on hold before it was actually configured. Was just sitting there with a public IP not doing much, but sure enough it was owned when I looked.
One interesting thing is that the machine had HTTP enabled, but we had locked down SSH already. In the config you could see the attacker tried to enable SSH but couldn’t get it working (subnet inverted, lol cisco).
On a home network, I like having the web UI enabled for local access out of convenience, and I like buying higher end networking equipment. I don’t enable it for external access though, that’s just asking for trouble.
It makes absolutely no sense in an enterprise environment, but there are a non-trivial number of non-enterprise customers of enterprise equipment.
Yeah this is one is on Cisco in general, still wondering why you’d have the web interface enabled anyways…just asking for problems right there.
If a fresh deployment isn’t secure out of the box, that’s definitely on cisco. There’s a lot of people out there who just plug in some hardware and then use the GUI to configure it. Just because it’s best practice to turn it off, doesn’t mean everyone is skilled enough to do so.
We did have one compromised router from this at work, a fresh deploy that someone did a while ago and then the project got put on hold before it was actually configured. Was just sitting there with a public IP not doing much, but sure enough it was owned when I looked.
One interesting thing is that the machine had HTTP enabled, but we had locked down SSH already. In the config you could see the attacker tried to enable SSH but couldn’t get it working (subnet inverted, lol cisco).
Yeah it is on Cisco, not questioning that.
Good catch getting it early, teach the young guys to kill those web portals…nothing but trouble. But I hear ya, sometimes CLI can be a pain.
On a home network, I like having the web UI enabled for local access out of convenience, and I like buying higher end networking equipment. I don’t enable it for external access though, that’s just asking for trouble.
It makes absolutely no sense in an enterprise environment, but there are a non-trivial number of non-enterprise customers of enterprise equipment.