Critical vulnerabilities in BIG-IP appliances leave big networks open to intrusion

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Researchers on Wednesday reported critical vulnerabilities in a widely used networking appliance that leaves some of the world’s biggest networks open to intrusion.

The vulnerabilities reside in BIG-IP Next Central Manager, a component in the latest generation of the BIG-IP line of appliances, which organizations use to manage traffic going into and out of their networks. Seattle-based F5, which sells the product, says its gear is used in 48 of the top 50 corporations as tracked by Fortune. F5 describes the Next Central Manager as a “single, centralized point of control” for managing entire fleets of BIG-IP appliances.

As devices performing load balancing, DDoS mitigation, and inspection and encryption of data entering and exiting large networks, BIG-IP gear sits at their perimeter and acts as a major pipeline to some of the most security-critical resources housed inside. Those characteristics have made BIG-IP appliances ideal for hacking. In 2021 and 2022, hackers actively compromised BIG-IP appliances by exploiting vulnerabilities carrying severity ratings of 9.8 out of 10.