Researchers say they’ve uncovered a series of potentially serious vulnerabilities in devices made by online privacy firm Winston Privacy. The vendor has released patches that are automatically being sent to devices.
Winston Privacy provides a hardware-based service designed to
boost online privacy and security. The company says it can block
online surveillance, accelerate browsing, and block ads and
trackers, and it also advertises its services as an alternative to
traditional VPNs.
A consultant at offensive security testing company Bishop Fox and an independent researcher discovered a total of 9 vulnerabilities in the device provided by Winston Privacy to customers. Many of the flaws have been assigned a severity rating of critical or high.
The types of security holes identified in the device include command injection, cross-site request forgery (CSRF), improper access control, insecure cross-origin resource sharing (CORS), default credentials, insufficient authorization controls, and undocumented SSH services.
They can be exploited for arbitrary code execution, privilege escalation, changing device settings and launching DoS attacks.
Chris Davis, the Bishop Fox researcher credited for finding the vulnerabilities, told SecurityWeek that an attacker could exploit some of these weaknesses to hack a Winston Privacy device remotely from the internet by convincing the targeted user to access a malicious webpage.
“Alternatively, if an attacker was on the local area network, an unauthenticated API request would also compromise the device,” Davis explained.
Justin Paglierani, the independent researcher credited for finding the vulnerabilities, explained that successful exploitation of the flaws can give an attacker root access to a device.
“In some configurations, this would allow an unauthenticated attacker direct access to your internal network, bypassing NAT, firewalls, etc,” Paglierani said via email. “In other configurations, it would allow an attacker to intercept any unencrypted traffic passing through the device.”
The vulnerabilities were reported to Winston Privacy in July and they were patched last week with the release of version 1.5.8. Firmware updates containing the patches are automatically sent to devices and users do not need to take any action.
Bishop Fox has published an advisory with technical details for each of the identified vulnerabilities.
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