Cisco Systems has identified more than 168,000 systems that are potentially exposed via its Cisco Smart Install Client, which the U.S. government said is being targeted by Russian state-sponsored hackers.
In an alert issued April 16, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team said Russian hackers are attacking networking devices, network management protocols and the Cisco Smart Install Client that belong to governments, infrastructure providers and businesses.
“Russian state-sponsored cyber actors have conducted both broad-scale and targeted scanning of Internet address spaces. Such scanning allows these actors to identify enabled Internet-facing ports and services, conduct device fingerprinting, and discover vulnerable network infrastructure devices,” said the April 16 alert, which was based on results of analytic efforts between the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre.