Russian Hackers Target 7-Year-Old Cisco Vulnerability to Harvest Configurations from Industrial Systems
A Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage group known as Static Tundra has been exploiting a seven-year-old vulnerability in Cisco networking devices to steal configuration data and maintain persistent access across critical infrastructure networks. This sophisticated threat actor, linked to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) Centre 16 unit, has targeted unpatched and end-of-life network devices since 2015, with operations significantly escalating following the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The campaign focuses on CVE-2018-0171, a previously disclosed vulnerability in Cisco IOS software’s Smart Install feature that allows unauthenticated remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or trigger denial-of-service conditions. Despite Cisco issuing patches in 2018, Static Tundra continues to successfully exploit organisations that have failed to apply security updates or are operating legacy devices beyond their support lifecycle. The group’s victims span the telecommunications, higher education, and manufacturing sectors across North America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, demonstrating remarkable persistence by maintaining access to compromised environments for multiple years without detection.
Static Tundra employs a methodical approach to configuration theft, beginning with the automated exploitation of the Smart Install vulnerability against predetermined target lists likely gathered from public scanning services like Shodan or Censys. Upon successful exploitation, the attackers modify the running configuration to enable local Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) services, allowing them to establish a secondary connection and retrieve the device’s startup configuration file. The extracted configurations often contain sensitive credentials and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) community strings that facilitate deeper network penetration. The threat actors leverage these compromised credentials to pivot laterally through network environments, using SNMP protocols with spoofed source addresses to bypass access control lists. Static Tundra has been observed creating privileged local user accounts and establishing Generic Routing Encapsulation tunnels to redirect and capture network traffic of intelligence value, highlighting their focus on long-term espionage rather than immediate financial gain.
Categories: Cyber Espionage, Vulnerability Exploitation, Network Security
Tags: Static Tundra, Cyber Espionage, Cisco, Vulnerability, Configuration Data, Smart Install, Exploitation, Network Devices, SNMP, TFTP