November 3, 2024

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Taiwan’s QNAP Denies Storage Equipment Infections Are Rising

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“Certain media reports declaring that the influenced machine count has improved from 7,000 to sixty two,000 given that Oct 2019 are inaccurate”

Taiwanese storage application and components seller QNAP claims there is no sign that bacterial infections of its goods are growing, soon after around sixty,000 of its network attached storage (NAS) devices were being noted to be contaminated with malware by an not known attacker.

The refined “Qsnatch” malware affecting QNAP’s NAS devices has the significantly discouraging element of avoiding directors from functioning firmware updates.

Around 3,900 QNAP NAS containers have been compromised in the Uk and an alarming 28,000-in addition in Western Europe, the NCSC warned July 27 in a joint advisory with the US’s CISA.

QNAP has given that instructed the figures have been misrepresented as a continual surge in bacterial infections from initial reports in late 2019 and claims the challenge is contained. (Carnegie Mellon, Thomson Reuters, Florida Tech, the Govt of Iceland were being between those people notified of infection by security researchers early in the campaign).

“Certain media reports declaring that the influenced machine count has improved from 7,000 to sixty two,000 given that Oct 2019 are inaccurate owing to a misinterpretation of reports from diverse authorities”, the corporation reported. “At this instant no malware variants are detected… the quantity of influenced devices displays no sign of a further incident.”

The QSnatch malware lets attackers steal login qualifications and procedure configuration data, this means patched containers are generally fast re-compromised.

As Computer Enterprise Evaluation has noted, QNAP at first flagged the menace in November 2019 and pushed out guidance at the time, but the NCSC reported also lots of devices remain contaminated: the initial infection vector continues to be deeply opaque, as do the motives of the attackers, whose publicly recognised C&C infrastructure is dormant.

“The attacker modifies the procedure host’s file, redirecting core area names applied by the NAS to regional out-of-date versions so updates can in no way be mounted,” the NCSC observed, including that it then uses a area technology algorithm to build a command and manage (C2) channel that “periodically generates a number of area names for use in C2 communications”. Current C2 infrastructure staying tracked is dormant.

The NCSC is recognized to have been in touch with QNAP about the incident.

Non-financial gain watchdog ShadowServer also noted related figures around the similar time. QNAP meanwhile reported that it has current its Malware Remover application for the QTS running procedure on November 1, 2019 to detect and clear away the malware from QNAP NAS and has also unveiled an current security advisory on November two, 2019 to address the challenge. QNAP reported it been emailing “possibly influenced users” to advise an quick update in between February and June this yr.