Security News > 2021 > April > Critical Vulnerability Can Allow Attackers to Hijack or Disrupt Juniper Devices

A critical vulnerability patched recently by networking and cybersecurity solutions provider Juniper Networks could allow an attacker to remotely hijack or disrupt affected devices.

In a security advisory published this week, Juniper said the vulnerability can be exploited by a remote, unauthenticated attacker for arbitrary code execution or to trigger a partial denial of service condition on the targeted device.

Exploitation of the vulnerability involves sending specially crafted packets to the targeted system and a sustained DoS attack could be launched by continuously sending malicious packets.

According to Nguyễn, an attacker who successfully exploits this vulnerability can gain root access to the targeted system and then install a backdoor or configure the device "In any way they want." The flaw can be exploited on its own and an attacker would not need to chain it with other vulnerabilities.

Attacks from the internet are possible in theory, but the vulnerable devices are typically not exposed to the internet.

In its advisory, Juniper explained, "The overlayd daemon handles Overlay OAM packets, such as ping and traceroute, sent to the overlay. The service runs as root by default and listens for UDP connections on port 4789. This issue results from improper buffer size validation, which can lead to a buffer overflow. Unauthenticated attackers can send specially crafted packets to trigger this vulnerability, resulting in possible remote code execution."

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