QNAP has had plenty of embarrassing bugs and zero days. They have tried to shift to a more security focused architecture, and are catching the other side of that sword right now.

QNAP’s firmware push was intended, in part, to cover recent security vulnerabilities in their devices. QNAP devices are a rich and frequent target of criminal hackers. A severe vulnerability from February 2023 allowed for remote SQL injections and potential administrative control of a device, affecting nearly 30,000 devices seen in network scans. It was a follow-on from attacks by DeadBolt, a ransomware gang that infected thousands of QNAP devices and cornered QNAP into automatically pushing emergency updates, even to customers with automatic updates turned off.

Security researchers at WatchTowr said they found 15 vulnerabilities in QNAP’s operating systems and cloud services and informed the company of them. After QNAP failed to patch some of those vulnerabilities far beyond the typical 90-day window (and then some), WatchTowr went public with its findings, dubbed “QNAPping at the Wheel.”