In a security advisory Zyxel has urged customers to update because a security flaw can lead to the circumvention of firewall protection in several Zyxel products.
Zyxel is a Taiwanese producer of modems and other networking equipment and its products are sold in over 150 countries.
The vulnerability
Zyxel says the vulnerability, listed as CVE-2022-0342, is an authentication bypass vulnerability caused by the lack of a proper access control mechanism, which has been found in the CGI program of some firewall versions. The flaw could allow an attacker to bypass the authentication and obtain administrative access of the device.
The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is an interface specification that enables web servers to execute an external program, typically to process user requests.
Affected series
Zyxel has published a list of vulnerable products that are within their warranty and support period, and has released updates to address the issue.
Affected series | Affected firmware version | Patch availability |
USG/ZyWALL | ZLD V4.20 through ZLD V4.70 | ZLD V4.71 |
USG FLEX | ZLD V4.50 through ZLD V5.20 | ZLD V5.21 Patch 1 |
ATP | ZLD V4.32 through ZLD V5.20 | ZLD V5.21 Patch 1 |
VPN | ZLD V4.30 through ZLD V5.20 | ZLD V5.21 |
NSG | V1.20 through V1.33 Patch 4 | Hotfix V1.33p4_WK11* available now Standard patch V1.33 Patch 5 in May 2022 |
From the security advisory it is unclear whether there are vulnerable products that are outside of the support period.
How to fix the Zyxel vulnerability
Administrators of the NSG V1.20 through V1.33 Patch 4 need to reach out to their local Zyxel support team for the file, or wait until May when standard patch V1.33 Patch 5 is scheduled to be released.
Owners of the other affected products can search for their updated firmware by model number on the Zyxel support download page. Please note that the patches should have a release date of 03/29/2022 or later.
For firewalls it is always a good idea to restrict the IP addresses that are permitted to access the management interface.
Stay safe, everyone!
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