Security News > 2023 > January > Hackers exploit Cacti critical bug to install malware, open reverse shells
More than 1,600 instances of the Cacti device monitoring tool reachable over the internet are vulnerable to a critical security issue that hackers have already started to exploit.
In early December 2022, a security advisory warned of a critical command injection vulnerability in Cacti that could be exploited without authentication.
Another exploit installed was IRC botnet that opened a reverse shell on the host and instructed it to run port scans.
In a report from Censys attack surface search platform for Internet-connected devices, there are 6,427 Cacti hosts exposed on the web.
The company could count 1,637 Cacti hosts reachable over the web that were vulnerable to CVE-2022-46169, many of them running version 1.1.38 of the monitoring solution, released in April 2021.
Of all Cacti hosts for which Censys could determine the version number, only 26 were running an updated release that was not vulnerable to the critical flaw.
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Related Vulnerability
| DATE | CVE | VULNERABILITY TITLE | RISK |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022-12-05 | CVE-2022-46169 | Incorrect Authorization vulnerability in Cacti Cacti is an open source platform which provides a robust and extensible operational monitoring and fault management framework for users. | 9.8 |