An issue was discovered on Zyxel GS1900 devices with firmware before 2.50(AAHH.0)C0. User accounts created through the web interface of the device, when given non-admin level privileges, have the same level of privileged access as administrators when connecting to the device via SSH (while their permissions via the web interface are in fact restricted). This allows normal users to obtain the administrative password by running the tech-support command via the CLI: this contains the encrypted passwords for all users on the device.

As these passwords are encrypted using well-known and static parameters, they can be decrypted and the original passwords (including the administrator password) can be obtained.