Recycled Core Routers Exposed Sensitive Corporate Network Info

upstart writes:

Researchers are warning about a dangerous wave of unwiped, secondhand core-routers:

Cameron Camp had purchased a Juniper SRX240H router last year on eBay to use in a honeypot network he was building to study remote desktop protocol (RDP) exploits and attacks on Microsoft Exchange and industrial control systems devices. When the longtime security researcher at Eset booted up the secondhand Juniper router, to his surprise it displayed a hostname.

After taking a closer look at the device, Camp contacted Tony Anscombe, Eset's chief security evangelist, to alert him what he found on the router. "This thing has a whole treasure trove of Silicon Valley A-list software company information on it," Camp recalls telling Anscombe.

"We got very, very concerned," Camp says.

Camp and Anscombe decided to test their theory that this could be the tip of the iceberg for other decommissioned routers still harboring information from their previous owners' networks. They purchased several more decommissioned core routers -- four Cisco Systems ASA 5500, three Fortinet FortiGate, and 11 Juniper Networks SRX Series Services Gateway routers.

After dropping a few from the mix after one failed to power up and another two were actually mirrored routers from a former cluster, they found that nine of the remaining 16 held sensitive core networking configuration information, corporate credentials, and data on corporate applications, customers, vendors, and partners. The applications exposed on the routers were big-name software used in many enterprises: Microsoft Exchange, Lync/Skype, PeopleSoft, Salesforce, Microsoft SharePoint, Spiceworks, SQL, VMWare Horizon View, voice over IP, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) applications.

[...] The routers contained one or more IPSec or VPN credentials, or hashed root passwords, and each had sufficient data for the researchers to identify the actual previous owner/operator of the device. Nearly 90% included router-to-router authentication keys and details on applications connected to the networks; some 44% had network credentials to other networks (such as a supplier or partner); 33% included third-party connections to the network; and 22% harbored customer information.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.