Critical Vulnerability in TP-Link Routers (CVE-2023-33538) Under Active Exploitation, CISA Issues Urgent Warning
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has recently included a critical security flaw affecting TP-Link wireless routers in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, highlighting evidence of ongoing exploitation. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2023-33538 (CVSS score: 8.8), involves a command injection issue that could allow arbitrary system command execution when handling the ssid1 parameter in a specially crafted HTTP GET request. Affected models include the TP-Link TL-WR940N V2/V4, TL-WR841N V8/V10, and TL-WR740N V1/V2, which expose this flaw through the /userRpm/WlanNetworkRpm component. CISA has warned that some impacted devices may be at end-of-life (EoL) or end-of-service (EoS), advising users to stop using them if no mitigations are available. Currently, there is limited public information on the nature of the active exploitation, including attack scale and targeted entities.