“Open sesame”: Industrial network gear hackable with the right username

This week, two separate security alerts have revealed major holes in devices from Moxa, an industrial automation networking company. In one case, attackers could potentially send commands to a device's operating system by using them as a username in a login attempt. In another, the private key for a Web server used to manage network devices could be retrieved through an HTTP GET request.

The first vulnerability, in Moxa's AWK-3131A 802.11n industrial wireless networking gear—which can act as an access point, bridge, or client device—was revealed by Cisco Talos on April 3. Because of the way user authentication for multiple features works—leveraging the "loginutils" tool of the Busybox operating system—the usernames from failed login attempts are processed in such a way that they could be leveraged to inject command-line instructions by using punctuation to separate the command from the rest of the command-line output.