Akamai Warns CUPS Vulnerability Also Brings New Threat of DDoS Attacks

Last week the Register warned 'If you're running the Unix printing system CUPS, with cups-browsed present and enabled, you may be vulnerable to attacks that could lead to your computer being commandeered over the network or internet.' (Although the CEO of cybersecurity platform watchTowr told them 'the vulnerability impacts less than a single-digit percentage of all deployed internet-facing Linux systems.')

But Tuesday generic (Slashdot reader #14,144) shared this new warning from Akamai:

Akamai researchers have confirmed a new attack vector using CUPS that could be leveraged to stage distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Research shows that, to begin the attack, the attacking system only needs to send a single packet to a vulnerable and exposed CUPS service with internet connectivity.

The Akamai Security Intelligence and Response Team (SIRT) found that more than 198,000 devices are vulnerable to this attack vector and are accessible on the public internet; roughly 34% of those could be used for DDoS abuse (58,000+). Of the 58,000+ vulnerable devices, hundreds exhibited an 'infinite loop' of requests.

The limited resources required to initiate a successful attack highlights the danger: It would take an attacker mere seconds to co-opt every vulnerable CUPS service currently exposed on the internet and cost the attacker less than a single US cent on modern hyperscaler platforms.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.