Critical bug impacting millions of IoT devices lets hackers spy on you

silversurfer

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Aug 17, 2014
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Security researchers are sounding the alarm on a critical vulnerability affecting tens of millions of devices worldwide connected via ThroughTek’s Kalay IoT cloud platform.

The security issue impacts products from various manufacturers providing video and surveillance solutions as well as home automation IoT systems that use the Kalay network for easy connectin and communication with a corresponding app.

A remote attacker could leverage the bug to gain access to the live audio and video streams, or to take control of the vulnerable device.
Researchers at Mandiant’s Red Team discovered the vulnerability at the end of 2020 and worked with the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and ThroughTek to coordinate the disclosure and create mitigation options.

Tracked as CVE-2021-28372, the issue is a device impersonation vulnerability that received a severity score of 9.6 out of 10. It affects the Kalay protocol that is implemented as a software development kit (SDK) that is built into mobile and desktop applications.

Mandiant’s Jake Valletta, Erik Barzdukas, and Dillon Franke looked at ThroughTek’s Kalay protocol and found that registering a device on the Kalay network required only the device’s unique identifier (UID).
 

show-Zi

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These risks are expected to attract attention only after they become widely used. Most of the current IoT conversation is about convenience, and I don't think there's a lot of talk about these dangers.
 
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CyberTech

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I really hate when this happened! i wish we could go back to 2000s it was really good tbh 😭
 

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