Hackers Are Exploiting a 5-Alarm Bug in Networking Equipment

Any company that uses a certain piece of networking equipment from Seattle-based F5 Networks had a rude interruption to their July 4 weekend, as a critical vulnerability turned the holiday into a race to implement a fix. Those who haven't done so by now may now have a much larger problem on their hands.

Late last week, government agencies, including the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team and Cyber Command, sounded the alarm about a particularly nasty vulnerability in a line of BIG-IP products sold by F5. The agencies recommended security professionals immediately implement a patch to protect the devices from hacking techniques that could fully take control of the networking equipment, offering access to all the traffic they touch and a foothold for deeper exploitation of any corporate network that uses them. Now some security companies say they're already seeing the F5 vulnerability being exploited in the wild—and they caution that any organization that didn't patch its F5 equipment over the weekend is already too late.

"This is the pre-exploit window to patch slamming shut right in front of your eyes," wrote Chris Krebs, the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in a tweet Sunday afternoon. "If you didn’t patch by this morning, assume compromised."