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Millions of Home Wi-Fi Routers are Likely Vulnerable to Unpatched Linux Security Exploits

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the keep-up-to-date-with-updates dept.

chromas writes:

Millions Of Home Wi-Fi Routers Are Likely Vulnerable To Unpatched Linux Security Exploits

If you're reading this article from home, it's likely that you're connected to a consumer-grade Wi-Fi router, either wirelessly or via hard wired Ethernet. And if that's the case, you should probably take this time to upgrade your router's firmware ASAP. That is if an update is even available from the manufacturer.

We say this because the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication (FKIE) in Germany recently performed test of 127 home routers, to probe them for their resistance to security threats. Of the routers the researchers tested, 91 percent of them were found to be running some version of embedded Linux, which isn't surprising.

What was surprising, however, was that the researchers found that not a single router was free of security flaws. In fact, it was discovered that many of these routers were actually susceptible to hundreds of known security vulnerabilities.

Reference:
Peter Weidenbach, Johannes vom Dorp. Home Router Security Report 2020 (pdf), FKIE

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  • (Score: 2) by jasassin on Tuesday July 07 2020, @09:42PM

    by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Tuesday July 07 2020, @09:42PM (#1017891) Homepage Journal

    I'm entirely too lazy to look over every kernel security fix over the past couple years and see if any of them could realistically affect something that runs no more than a router does but it's far from impossible or even unlikely.

    There's probably going to be a few new vulnerabilities added the way the Linux devs shoot so much code out their ass. FWIW I'd be more concerned about the gaping WPS hole on almost every router. HINT: Disable WPS on your routers ASAP!

    With airgeddon [github.com] I was able to acquire a WiFi password, via a WPS vulnerability, in about 10 seconds. No need to crack WPA2.

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