Expired Juniper routers find new life – as Chinese spy hubs Chinese spies have for months exploited old Juniper Networks routers, infecting the buggy gear with custom backdoors and gaining root access to the compromised devices. According to a Tuesday report from Google Threat Intelligence and a Juniper Networks security advisory, the affected Juniper MX routers were running end-of- …
The bit that's vulnerable in these boxes is the management software**, software that will invariably use a generic network stack with all its attendant bugs and shortcomings. Fixing this code is likely to be a tedious slog but worth doing if the customer has enough units deployed in the field. Obviously from a sales perspective it would be preferable to condemn the units as 'expired', out of date, obsolete and so on but you're probably going to end up spending a lot of money replacing a set of known problems with a set of unknown ones.
(**Designed a few of these sorts of boxes myself. Guilty of putting in generic stacks. My defense is that I was young & innocent and also had absolutely no idea that any fool of a customer would put these units on the public Internet without using some kind of serious firewall.)
