NetGear routers rooted by SQLi

A BlackHat presenter has extracted passwords from temporary databases in consumer routers including Netgear using SQL Injection attacks.

Tactical Network Solutions researcher Zachary Cutlip gained remote root access to Netgear wireless routers using SQL injection (SQLi) to exploit unexposed buffer overflows.

The same SQLi was used to extract plain text passwords from the routers' file systems.

The research, reported on DarkReading and to be presented at BlackHat Las Vegas this month, would show how low-level exploits could be strung together to gain root access to consumer routers.

Cutlip told DarkReading he hoped the attacks demonstrated that researchers shouldn't overlook SQL injection vulnerabilities that may seem benign.

"In this case, we're going to be exploiting a SQL injection in a database that has very temporary data but it has no valuable data whatsoever.

"So it might seem there would be no motivation to attack the database. But by doing so, it's going to give us access to some other vulnerabilities."

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