from disclosure to weapon13 days
Action required by CISAfederal deadline: 2022-09-29
Apply updates per vendor instructions. If the affected device has since entered end-of-life, it should be disconnected if still in use.
In short
NETGEAR routers can leak the admin password through a crafted web request if password recovery is not enabled. An attacker can access the router's web panel and retrieve the admin credentials without authorization.
Technical detail
The vulnerability exists in the password recovery mechanism (/passwordrecovered.cgi) on affected NETGEAR routers. By canceling authentication and obtaining a recovery token, an unauthenticated attacker can submit the token to retrieve the plaintext admin password if password recovery is disabled. Remote exploitation requires remote management enabled; local exploitation requires network access (LAN/WLAN).
Summary generated and translated by AI from the official description.
The full analysis of this CVE is available in Portuguese →
An issue was discovered on NETGEAR R8500, R8300, R7000, R6400, R7300, R7100LG, R6300v2, WNDR3400v3, WNR3500Lv2, R6250, R6700, R6900, and R8000 devices. They are prone to password disclosure via simple crafted requests to the web management server. The bug is exploitable remotely if the remote management option is set, and can also be exploited given access to the router over LAN or WLAN. When trying to access the web panel, a user is asked to authenticate; if the authentication is canceled and password recovery is not enabled, the user is redirected to a page that exposes a password recovery token. If a user supplies the correct token to the page /passwordrecovered.cgi?id=TOKEN (and password recovery is not enabled), they will receive the admin password for the router. If password recovery is set the exploit will fail, as it will ask the user for the recovery questions that were previously set when enabling that feature. This is persistent (even after disabling the recovery option, the exploit will fail) because the router will ask for the security questions.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
⚠ Public resources, to assess the exposure of systems you control or are authorized to test. Test only with authorization.