QNAP Issues Advisory on Zerologon Vulnerability

22 October 2020

QNAP Issues Advisory on Zerologon Vulnerability

Storage solutions provider QNAP this week published an advisory to warn customers that certain versions of QTS, the operating system for its network-attached storage (NAS) devices, are affected by the Zerologon vulnerability.

Residing in the Microsoft Windows Netlogon Remote Protocol (MS-NRPC) and addressed on August 2020 Patch Tuesday, the flaw started gaining attention after CISA on September 18 issued an Emergency Directive requiring federal agencies to install the available patches within three days.

Soon after, Microsoft and CISA revealed that threat actors were already targeting the vulnerability in their attacks, urging organizations to patch all domain controllers to ensure their environments are protected.

To date, both Iranian and Russian adversaries were observed abusing Zerologon, and CISA issued an alert to warn of attacks chaining exploits for this flaw with those targeting bugs in Fortinet FortiOS VPN and MobileIron MDM solutions.

This week, QNAP revealed that it too released patches for Zerologon, to ensure that its devices can’t be abused to take over entire networks.

NAS devices can be used as Windows domain controllers to allow administrators to leverage them for operations such as authentication and user account management.

“If exploited, this elevation of privilege vulnerability allows remote attackers to bypass security measures via a compromised QTS device on the network. The NAS may be exposed to this vulnerability if users have configured the device as a domain controller in Control Panel > Network & File Services > Win/Mac/NFS > Microsoft Networking,” the company explains.

QTS 4.5.1.1456 build 20201015 and later, QTS 4.4.3.1439 build 20200925 and later, QTS 4.3.6.1446 build 20200929 and later, QTS 4.3.4.1463 build 20201006 and later, and QTS 4.3.3.1432 build 20201006 and later contain fixes for the vulnerability. QTS 2.x and QES, QNAP notes, are not impacted.

Users are advised to update QTS to the latest available version and to ensure that all other applications on their devices are up to date. Users can check for new updates for their NAS model on the product support status page.

QNAP’s advisory also includes details on how users can apply the newly released QTS updates, as well as on how to update all of the installed applications.