[bshipp]

I don't know if I would say it's a nothing burger, but i don't see how it affects important servers. It might impact a number of linux desktops and, if they are linked to important servers, provide a backdoor access into important services.

Being able to run arbitrary code in a root account with no authentication would seem to be a pretty important security breach, although I don't think it's quite the level of danger it was built up to be.

[andersa]

But why would such desktops be exposed to the public internet directly?

[bshipp]

Likely no good reason. But he seemed to have identified many many systems that were, inexplicably, exposing port 631 to the internet. There is some reason people are doing it and, given the number of target systems, it must be some sort of default configuration.

  > "This thing is packaged for anything, in some cases it’s enabled by default, in others it’s not, go figure . Full disclosure, I’ve been scanning the entire public internet IPv4 ranges several times a day for weeks, sending the UDP packet and logging whatever connected back. And I’ve got back connections from hundreds of thousands of devices, with peaks of 200-300K concurrent devices. This file contains a list of the unique Linux systems affected. Note that everything that is not Linux has been filtered out. That is why I was getting increasingly alarmed during the last few weeks."

[bonzini]

The 9.9 issue is the foomatic-rip vulnerability; not cups-browsed listening on 0.0.0.0. See here:

> LAN: a local attacker can spoof zeroconf / mDNS / DNS-SD advertisements (we will talk more about this in the next writeup) and achieve the same code path leading to RCE.

[dumpsterdiver]

The likely target that emerged in my mind reading this is mom and pop point of sale systems.

The operators of such systems are completely oblivious to such risks, and the underpaid PoS software support team following a script to restart CUPS probably are as well.