Routers from various manufacturers support UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) on their WAN interfaces, which apparently makes it possible for attackers to reconfigure them remotely via the internet and, for example, misuse them as surfing proxies or to infiltrate internal LANs. The problem was discovered by IT security specialist Daniel Garcia, who has developed the Umap tool to demonstrate the problem; the tool is available to download free of charge.
Umap detects UPnP-enabled end devices such as DSL routers and cable modems on the internet by directly retrieving the devices' XML descriptions. The required URLs and ports for some models are hard-coded into the tool. This enables the software to bypass the usual restriction that only allows UPnP to search for compatible hardware via multicast in local networks. Garcia says that entire device series by Edimax, Linksys, Sitecom or Thomson (SpeedTouch) respond to UPnP requests on their WAN interfaces.

The link for this article located at H Security is no longer available.