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Researchers have discovered a vulnerability in Nuuo surveillance cameras which can be exploited to hijack these devices and tamper with footage and live feeds.

On Thursday, cybersecurity firm Digital Defense said that its Vulnerability Research Team (VRT) had uncovered a zero-day vulnerability in Nuuo NVRmini 2 Network Video Recorder firmware, software used by hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras worldwide.

The software is used in a variety of the firm's surveillance camera products. Based on Linux, the solution supports NAS storage and is able to monitor up to 64 live video channels.

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The vulnerability is an unauthenticated remote buffer overflow security flaw which can be exploited by attackers execute arbitrary code on the system with root privileges. Not only could threat actors harness the bug to access and modify camera feeds & recordings, but also to change the configuration and settings of cameras.

In order to exploit the vulnerability, attackers can send a crafted GET request to a service which is using the vulnerable firmware. As long as there is a URI length of 351 or greater included in the packet, this will trigger the stack overflow.

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"Overflowing of the stack variable, which is intended to hold the request data, results in the overwriting of stored return addresses, and with a properly crafted payload, can be leveraged to achieve arbitrary code execution," Digital Defense says.

The source of the problem lies in a failure to properly sanitize user-supplied inputs, combined with a lack of URI length checks.

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NVRmini 2 firmware version 3.9.1 and prior is vulnerable to exploit. Nuuo responded quickly to the researcher's disclosure and has released a patch which resolves the issue. The fix can be downloaded here.

Back in September, researchers from Tenable revealed a remote code execution flaw in Nuuo cameras. This vulnerability, nicknamed Peekaboo, also permitted attackers to tamper with camera footage.

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