Clients of popular network-attached storage (NAS) appliance vendor Synology were briefly exposed to a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, the company has revealed.
Synology identified an improper certificate validation vulnerability in the OpenVPN client of their Synology Router Manager (SRM) as the culprit.
Due to this vulnerability, unscrupulous agents could’ve obtained sensitive login credentials from users by crafting and inserting a fake SSL certificate.
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To its credit, Synology was quick to issue an update to eliminate the threat - with the Talos Vulnerability Report on the issue explaining in more detail.
According to the report, there was an information disclosure vulnerability in the QuickConnect authentication function of the SRM. This meant attackers were in a position to exploit this flaw and impersonate as a valid remote VPN endpoint.
This would cause unsuspecting users to provide the attackers with their VPN credentials. Attackers could then use this information to impersonate the remote client and in turn obtain the router’s credentials as well.
The report also states that an attacker could perform a man-in-the-middle attack to trigger this vulnerability.
All’s well that ends well
Synology was quick to flag this vulnerability, which affects SRM versions prior to v1.2.4-8081, as severe.
Soon afterwards the company fixed the issue by releasing an update to the SRM. The company advises all its users to update to v1.2.4-8081.
We’d like to use this opportunity to remind all our readers to keep all their software updated. Most applications can update themselves automatically by default.
If you’ve decided to override this behaviour, and prefer to install updates manually, keep your eyes peeled for any security updates and switch to them as soon as they are available.
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