Time Warner said that in the last week has patched the problem until the manufacturer can offer a permanent solution, but before they were allowed administrative access to routers. Attackers could execute a variety of programs against these routers, said David Chen in his blog Chenosaurus.
Due to the vulnerability that anyone in any part of the Internet to take control of the router, could launch attacks from within Time Warner customers homes.
“From within your own network, an attacker can intercept sensitive data from being sent over the Internet and what is worse, you can manipulate the DNS to point to trusted sites to malicious servers to carry out attacks” man-in -the-middle “writes Chen. “Someone skilled enough, possibly, can even customize and install a new firmware in the router, which can automatically scan and infect other routers automatically.”
Chen says he discovered that the administrative control of the routers had been blocked by a Java script. He Java disabled on the router to his friend and had access to all settings of the router. He opened the configuration file backup and found the user name and administrative password in plain text.
He says he was able to run a port scan IP addresses of Time Warner and found dozens of these routers that were open to attack. The router in question is the SMC 8014 wireless router and cable modem, said Alex Dudley, vice president of public relations for Time Warner. He says his company is waiting for a permanent solution of SMC that Time Warner will run quality control tests before pushing the affected routers.
Chen also notes that the router only allows encryption of Wired Equivalent Privacy, which he breaks down easily, allowing anyone who can break WEP network access. He also said that the fixed format of the routers SSID ‘to discover that the Wi-Fi are provided by SMC 8014s.