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Cisco Routers Are Being Targeted with Malicious Firmware

Attackers are targeting specific Cisco routers for infection, allowing traffic monitoring and malware injection.

The malware, called SYNful Knock and discovered by researchers at FireEye, hides itself in the router and, due to it modifying the firmware, can go undetected by standard antivirus and antimalware software, said the security firm.

"It is customizable and modular in nature and thus can be updated once implanted," said researchers at FireEye in a post detailing the active attack. "Even the presence of the backdoor can be difficult to detect as it uses non-standard packets as a form of pseudo-authentication."

FireEye said that this incident is unique due to the idea of router firmware implant attacks were largely believed to be only theoretical up to this point. However, the company said that it has found infected routers in Mexico, Ukraine, India and the Philippines.  

How SYNful Knock works is that once an attacker loads the modified Cisco IOS image into the router, they can load and execute functional modules remotely, while gaining total access through the use of a backdoor password. Once in, attackers can monitor both outgoing and incoming traffic, as well as load additional malicious modules. Because the infection is done on the firmware level, resetting or powering down the router will not remove the threat, and the only solution is to reimage the hardware with the original IOS.  

"The impact of finding this implant on your network is severe and most likely indicates the presence of other footholds or compromised systems," said FireEye. "This backdoor provides ample capability for the attacker to propagate and compromise other hosts and critical data using this as a very stealthy beachhead."

It's important to note that the initial implantation would need the attacker to either have physical access to the hardware or know the router password. The company acknowledged that the most likely scenario for infection is attackers gaining access through unchanged, factory default passwords.

So far FireEye said that it has found that Cisco Router models 1841, 2811 and 3825 are the only ones vulnerable.

Cisco has confirmed that the FireEye report on SYNful Knock is correct, and that the attacks do not take advantage of any vulnerabilities in the hardware's software. It also advises that those with the router models in question take steps to strengthen security. "Given their role in a customer’s infrastructure, networking devices are a valuable target for threat actors and should be protected as such," wrote Omar Santos, incident manager for Cisco, in a blog post.  "We recommend that customers of all networking vendors include methods for preventing and detecting compromise in their operational procedures."

With FireEye saying this "stealthy router implant" is the first of its kind to enter the wild, the security firm expects to see its usage and similar attacks to spread quickly. "It should be evident now that this attack vector is very much a reality and will most likely grow in popularity and prevalence," said FireEye.

About the Author

Chris Paoli (@ChrisPaoli5) is the associate editor for Converge360.

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