Dive Brief:
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The CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University has issued an alert stating that DSL routers from different manufacturers contain a guessable hard-coded password.
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A remote attacker may utilize these credentials to gain administrator access to the affected devices over their telnet service, CERT said.
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The vulnerability is not new, but it hasn't been known until now that other devices were also affected.
Dive Insight:
All of the devices have an admin password in the form "XXXXairocon" where XXXX are the last four characters of the device's physical MAC address, according to CERT/CC.
A device's full MAC address can easily be obtained by sending a public query over the Simple Network Management Protocol.
Earlier this year, a security researcher found similar vulnerabilities in a significant number of DSL router models from different manufacturers that were distributed by ISPs from around the world. All of the devices were running firmware developed by the same Chinese company.
