CVE-2017-5521

HIGH

8.1

CVSS Score

Published: January 17, 2017 at 09:22 AM UTC

Updated: June 17, 2026 at 01:20 AM UTC

26 products affected across 1 vendorWNDR4500 FirmwareR6300 FirmwareD6220 Firmware

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Severity

HIGH8.1

Exploitation

CISA KEV

Exploit prediction

EPSS 89%

SSVC

Active

Actively Exploited

CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog

EPSS Score89.4%

EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) estimates a 89.4% chance this CVE is exploited in the wild within the next 30 days — higher than 100% of all CVEs. It complements CVSS: a high EPSS on a mid-severity CVE can still be urgent.

Multiple NETGEAR devices are prone to admin password disclosure via simple crafted requests to the web management server.

Required Action

Apply updates per vendor instructions. If the affected device has since entered end-of-life, it should be disconnected if still in use.

Ransomware Use

Unknown

Added to KEV

Sep 8, 2022

Remediation Due

Sep 29, 2022

1488 days overdue

Notes

https://kb.netgear.com/30632/Web-GUI-Password-Recovery-and-Exposure-Security-Vulnerability

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-5521

Description

An issue was discovered on NETGEAR R8500, R8300, R7000, R6400, R7300, R7100LG, R6300v2, WNDR3400v3, WNR3500Lv2, R6250, R6700, R6900, and R8000 devices. They are prone to password disclosure via simple crafted requests to the web management server. The bug is exploitable remotely if the remote management option is set, and can also be exploited given access to the router over LAN or WLAN. When trying to access the web panel, a user is asked to authenticate; if the authentication is canceled and password recovery is not enabled, the user is redirected to a page that exposes a password recovery token. If a user supplies the correct token to the page /passwordrecovered.cgi?id=TOKEN (and password recovery is not enabled), they will receive the admin password for the router. If password recovery is set the exploit will fail, as it will ask the user for the recovery questions that were previously set when enabling that feature. This is persistent (even after disabling the recovery option, the exploit will fail) because the router will ask for the security questions.