"Dozens of Unpatched Flaws Expose Security Cameras Made by Defunct Company Zavio"
Security researchers at BugProve have discovered dozens of vulnerabilities in security cameras made by Zavio. Zavio is a defunct Chinese company, but its security cameras are reportedly still deployed in the United States and Europe. Since Zavio has been shut down, the researchers worked with CCTV Camera Pros, the main distributor of Zavio cameras in North America, to verify the vulnerabilities and with the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to coordinate the disclosure and obtain CVE identifiers for the flaws. The researchers identified more than 34 memory corruption and command injection vulnerabilities affecting various Zavio IP camera models, specifically a daemon called "Onvif," which is used for integrations with various surveillance systems. According to the researchers, seven of the vulnerabilities can be exploited for unauthenticated remote code execution with root privileges. The researchers noted that these types of flaws can typically enable attackers to take complete control of the targeted device. IP cameras can be targeted to hijack their video feeds, but in the wild, they are mostly targeted by botnets and abused for DDoS and other attacks. While the researchers have found many individual vulnerabilities, CISA has decided to assign only two CVE identifiers, CVE-2023-4249 and CVE-2023-3959, due to the flaws stemming from the same core issues. Since the impacted Zavio cameras will not receive patches, users have been advised to replace the devices to prevent falling victim to cyberattacks. CCTV Camera Pros is informing customers that Zavio cameras are no longer available and is recommending alternatives. The researchers originally discovered the weaknesses in late 2022, but the disclosure process was long due to the vendor's failure to respond, and due to the time it took CISA to verify the vulnerabilities.