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Unpatchable 0-day in surveillance cam is being exploited to install Mirai

Unpatchable 0-day in surveillance cam is being exploited to install Mirai

A zero-day (also known as zero-hour or 0-day) vulnerability is an undisclosed computer application vulnerability that could be exploited to adversely affect the computer programs, data, additional computers or a network. It is known as a "zero-day" because once the flaw becomes known, the application author has zero days in which to plan and advise any mitigation against its exploitation (by, for example, advising workarounds or issuing patches). Attacks employing zero-day exploits are often attempted before or on the day that notice of the vulnerability is released to the public; sometimes before the author is aware or has developed and made available corrected code. Zero-day attacks are a severe threat.

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Malicious hackers are exploiting a critical vulnerability in a widely used security camera to spread Mirai, a family of malware that wrangles infected Internet of Things devices into large networks for use in attacks that take down websites and other Internet-connected devices.

The attacks target the AVM1203, a surveillance device from Taiwan-based manufacturer AVTECH, network security provider Akamai said Wednesday. Unknown attackers have been exploiting a 5-year-old vulnerability since March. The zero-day vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-7029, is easy to exploit and allows attackers to execute malicious code. The AVM1203 is no longer sold or supported, so no update is available to fix the critical zero-day.

That time a ragtag army shook the Internet

Akamai said that the attackers are exploiting the vulnerability so they can install a variant of Mirai, which arrived in September 2016 when a botnet of infected devices took down cybersecurity news site Krebs on Security. Mirai contained functionality that allowed a ragtag army of compromised webcams, routers, and other types of IoT devices to wage distributed denial-of-service attacks of record-setting sizes. In the weeks that followed, the Mirai botnet delivered similar attacks on Internet service providers and other targets. One such attack, against dynamic domain name provider Dyn paralyzed vast swaths of the Internet.

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