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CVE-2017-5521

High 8.1 Exploited in the wild (KEV)

Confirmed active exploitation — CISA KEV catalog

Name
NETGEAR Multiple Devices Exposure of Sensitive Information Vulnerability
Added to catalog
Remediation due date (US federal)
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.

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.

Metrics

CVSS 3.1
8.1 (HIGH) Score source: NVD CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
EPSS — exploit probability
89% (percentile: 100) as of 1 November 2026

Affected products

netgear: r6200 firmware; netgear: r6200; netgear: r6300 firmware; netgear: r6300; netgear: vegn2610 firmware; netgear: vegn2610; netgear: ac1450 firmware; netgear: ac1450; netgear: wnr1000v3 firmware; netgear: wnr1000v3; netgear: wndr3700v3 firmware; netgear: wndr3700v3; netgear: wndr4000 firmware; netgear: wndr4000; netgear: wndr4500 firmware

References