Cyberwarfare / Nation-State Attacks
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Endpoint Security
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Fraud Management & Cybercrime
CISA Lists Flaws as Actively Exploited

Hackers are actively exploiting years-old flaws in obsolete Wi-Fi cameras and video recorders made by D-Link, warn U.S. cybersecurity authorities.
See Also: The Healthcare CISO’s Guide to Medical IoT Security
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Tuesday added two vulnerabilities dating from 2020 and one from 2022 to its list of actively exploited vulnerabilities. The additions follow a December 2024 advisory warning that threat actors were actively scanning internet-facing devices vulnerable to one of the flaws as part of ongoing HiatusRAT campaigns (see: FBI Warns of HiatusRAT Targeting Vulnerable IoT Devices).
Hackers especially prize obsolete devices as fodder for botnets given their lack of patches and their tendency to be abandoned by owners despite still being online. Estimates peg the number of working IoT devices across the globe at nearly 20 billion. Even a small percentage of obsolete or unpatched devices continuing to function past their end-of-life date adds up to millions of targets.
CISA said hackers are actively exploiting CVE-2020-25078, CVE-2020-25079 and CVE-2022-40799. The first two vulnerabilities affect IP-connected cameras made by Taiwanese manufacturer D-Link. The firm released patches. The last is a flaw in a D-Link network video recorder; D-Link instead advised users to stop using the device.
The FBI in December dubbed HiatusRAT by researchers at U.S. telecom Lumen. The same hackers in summer 2023 probed a U.S. military procurement system and targeted Taiwan-based organizations. Lumen hasn’t attributed Hiatus actors to any known threat actor, but said its targets “are synonymous with the strategic interest of the People’s Republic of China.”
CVE-2020-25078 is rated 7.5 on the CVSS scale and enables remote attackers to retrieve the camera’s administrator password. The flaw bypasses the device’s weak authentication. The other two flaws involve command injection and hardcoded credential flaws. Attackers can exploit these vulnerabilities to take control of affected devices, change configurations and potentially pivot into internal networks.
“Attackers don’t care if a vulnerability is new or old – they only care if they can successfully exploit it, and that’s the case here,” said Stuart Green, cloud security architect at Check Point Software. “A quick search on Shodan shows about 1,600 D-Link devices vulnerable to CVE-2020-25078 and those are just the ones currently online.”
Hiatus actors haven’t limited themselves to D-Link devices, with the FBI also warning that cameras made by Chinese companies Hikvision, Dahua and Xiongmai. Lumen spotted the threat actor VPN gateways made by Vigor.
