Month: February 2018

Netgear router update

If you use a Netgear router for your home network, please log on to your router and use the upgrade feature to apply an important security update. That feature is probably located under the Advanced and/or Administration sections of the router’s web-based menus.

This update addresses several vulnerabilities, some of which are remotely exploitable. The linked page indicates which vulnerabilities affect which routers, and I found that my router was affected by one of the vulnerabilities.

If a character in a story you’re writing needed to exploit this kind of thing against a target, it’s not a great stretch of the imagination. If your character emailed her target an email with a link to a web page she controls, and if the target clicked the link while on a computer at home, she’d have the target’s IP address (she could get that from looking at server logs). Once she knew the target’s IP address, she could interrogate the address herself with readily-available network tools, or she could use something like shodan to try to identify the kind of router her target uses. If the target has remote administration enabled (which may be a default settings in some router models), she could use publicized vulnerabilities like the ones linked above to break into her target’s home network.

You should probably run updates on your home router even if it isn’t made by Netgear.

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Flash Player Zero-Day

A zero-day vulnerability is a software defect that doesn’t yet have a patch from the vendor. One of these currently exists for Adobe Flash Player, and it is being actively targeted by a working exploit. This particular defect (CVE-2018-4878) is a use-after-free vulnerability which allows remote code execution. This means that Flash Player tries to read instructions from a memory address that is no longer valid, and that the exploit is able to put malicious code at that memory address, causing Flash Player to execute the malicious code introduced by the exploit.

South Korean security researchers say that North Korea developed this exploit and have embedded it in Microsoft Word documents in an effort to attack South Koreans doing security research on North Korea, and that this has been going on for two or three months.

This zero-day started making news on 1 February, and Adobe says it’ll release a patch the week of 5 February. As in this case, it can take the vendor a while to address a defect like this. So if your character needs to compromise someone’s computer, she might search Dark Web forums for a recent zero-day like this and send it to her target in a phishing email, especially if she knows that her target is not diligent about keeping their computer up-to-date.

And if you use Flash Player, make sure you apply the patch when Adobe releases it. Version 28.0.0.137 is the affected version.