CVE-2017-5521

critical-risk
Published 2017-01-17

An issue was discovered on NETGEAR R8500, R8300, R7000, R6400, R7300, R7100LG, R6300v2, WNDR3400v3, WNR3500Lv2, R6250, R6700, R6900, and R8000 devices. They are prone to password disclosure via simple crafted requests to the web management server. The bug is exploitable remotely if the remote management option is set, and can also be exploited given access to the router over LAN or WLAN. When trying to access the web panel, a user is asked to authenticate; if the authentication is canceled and password recovery is not enabled, the user is redirected to a page that exposes a password recovery token. If a user supplies the correct token to the page /passwordrecovered.cgi?id=TOKEN (and password recovery is not enabled), they will receive the admin password for the router. If password recovery is set the exploit will fail, as it will ask the user for the recovery questions that were previously set when enabling that feature. This is persistent (even after disabling the recovery option, the exploit will fail) because the router will ask for the security questions.

Do I need to act?

!
93.8% chance of exploitation in next 30 days
EPSS score — higher than 6% of all CVEs
!
CISA KEV: actively exploited in the wild
On the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog — federal agencies must patch
!
1 public exploit available
?
Patch status unknown
Check vendor advisories for fix availability and mitigation guidance
8
CVSS 8.1/10 High
NETWORK / HIGH complexity

Affected Vendors

75
/ 100
critical-risk
Severity 24/34 · High
Exploitability 34/34 · Critical
Exposure 17/34 · Moderate