This week, inquisitive netizens discovered that, when presented with even modest amounts of network packets – as little as 1.5Mbps spread across various TCP or UDP ports – modems equipped with a Puma 6 slow to an unusable crawl.
According to one engineer who spoke to El Reg on the issue, the flaw would be “trivial” to exploit in the wild, and would effectively render a targeted box useless for the duration of the attack.
“You send a stream of 200Kbps of TCP, UDP or maybe even ICMP to different port numbers, and it has a tiny table to keep track of these that fills up. The device becomes immediately unresponsive. It comes back after you stop,” our tipster explained.
“It can be exploited remotely, and there is no way to mitigate the issue.”
Source: FYI: You can blow Intel-powered broadband modems off the ‘net with a ‘trivial’ packet stream
Robin Edgar
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