>20, 000 Linksys routers leak historic record of every device ever connected

Steven Schear schear.steve at gmail.com
Sun May 19 10:23:34 PDT 2019


https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/33-linksys-router-models-leak-full-historic-record-of-every-device-ever-connected/


Independent researcher Troy Mursch said the leak is the result of a flaw in
almost three dozen models of Linksys routers. It took about 25 minutes for
the Binary Edge search engine of Internet-connected devices to find 21,401
vulnerable devices on Friday. A scan earlier in the week found 25,617. They
were leaking a total of 756,565 unique MAC addresses. Exploiting the flaw
requires only a few lines of code that harvest every MAC address, device
name, and operating system that has ever connected to each of them.

The flaw allows snoops or hackers to assemble disparate pieces of
information that most people assume aren’t public. By combining a
historical record of devices that have connected to a public IP addresses,
marketers, abusive spouses, and investigators can track the movements of
people they want to track. The disclosure can also be useful to hackers.
The Shadowhammer group, for instance, recently infected as many as 1
million people after hacking the software update mechanism of computer
maker ASUS. The hackers then used a list of about 600 MAC addresses of
specific targets that, if infected, would receive advanced stages of the
malware.
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