Routers manufactured by Netcore and sold worldwide under Netis brand have a wide-open backdoor that can be fairly easily exploited by threat actors.

Experts at TrendMicro discovered that routers manufactured by Chinese security vendor and sold under the brand name Netcore in China have a hard-coded password. The hard-coded password allows attackers to access user’s traffic with a backdoor, the Netcore routers are also sold in other countries, including South Korea, Taiwan, Israel and United States, under the brand Netis.

Netis routers provide the best wireless transfer speed up to 300Mbps, offering a better performance for different applications like video streaming and routers provide the best wireless transfer speed up to 300Mbps, offering a better performance for different applications like video streaming and VoIP phone calling.

As explained in the blog post published by Tim Yeh, Threat Researcher at Trend Micro, bad actors could exploit the backdoor to bypass router security and to run malicious code on device or change settings.

“This backdoor is “protected” by a single, hardcoded password located in the router’s firmware. Netcore/Netis routers appear to all have the same password. This “protection” is essentially ineffective, as attackers can easily log into these routers and users cannot modify or disable this backdoor. Almost all Netcore/Netis routers appear to have this vulnerability, based on the information we examined.”states the post.

The backdoor discovered by experts is an open UDP port, accessible from the WAN side of the router, listening at port 53413. The presence of the backdoor allows attackers to compromise the Netcore router if it is accessible from the Internet just knowing the password hardcoded into the firmware. This attack scenario is common for almost all residential and SMB users, exploiting the backdoor the threat actors could upload or download malicious code, change device settings, run a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack to eavesdrop the user’s internet communication and steal sensitive information.

In the following image is reported the output Netstat tool which reports the Local addressed for the web admin and backdoor ports.

Netcore – Netis routers are known for providing the best wireless transfer speed up to 300Mbps, offering a better performance on online gaming, video streaming, and VoIP phone calling.