CVE-2020-8657

What is EyesOfNetwork?

EyesOfNetwork is an open-source IT monitoring and supervision platform, combining infrastructure monitoring, ITIL service management, and reporting in a single self-hosted tool used by organizations that want an open alternative to commercial network monitoring suites. Like most monitoring platforms, it holds broad visibility into an organization's infrastructure status and often has integrations or credentials for the systems it monitors.

Overview

CVE-2020-8657 is a use of hard-coded credentials vulnerability (CWE-798): every EyesOfNetwork installation ships with the same default API key rather than generating a unique one per deployment. Because the platform's administrative access token is derived from this shared, predictable key, an attacker who knows the default key value — trivially discoverable since it's identical across every install — can compute or guess a valid administrative access token without ever needing to authenticate through the normal login flow (CVSS 3.1: AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H, 9.8 Critical).

Technical Details

The root cause is a design flaw rather than a coding bug: shipping a fixed, shared secret as a default configuration value and deriving privileged access tokens from it means the "secret" isn't secret at all once the software is public. Any deployment that hasn't explicitly rotated the default API key remains vulnerable to unauthenticated administrative access, regardless of other hardening applied to the instance.

Discovery

Publicly tracked via NVD; consistent with a class of vulnerability commonly found in open-source monitoring and management tools that ship convenience defaults intended to be changed post-install but frequently aren't.

Exploitation Context

CISA added this CVE to KEV in November 2021 based on confirmed exploitation activity. As with many hard-coded-credential vulnerabilities in self-hosted open-source tools, exploitation likely consists largely of automated scanning for instances that never rotated the default key, rather than sophisticated targeted attacks.

Remediation

1. Rotate the default API key on every EyesOfNetwork installation immediately if this has not already been done — this is the single action that closes the vulnerability.
2. Upgrade to a version of EyesOfNetwork that generates a unique key per installation, if available, rather than relying solely on manual rotation.
3. Restrict network access to the EyesOfNetwork web interface to trusted administrative networks; monitoring platforms should not be directly internet-facing.
4. Audit for unauthorized administrative access in EyesOfNetwork's logs if the default key was never rotated and the instance was internet-reachable at any point.