Home and small-office routers is a hot target for security audits. Vulnerabilities and poor security practices is becoming the rule, rather than the exception. Researchers from Universidad Europea de Madrid found 60 distinct flaws in 22 devices. Full details of their research can be read in the Full Disclosure mailing list. Affected brands include D-Link, Belkin, Linksys, Huawei, and others. Among the flaws are at least one backdoor with a hard-coded password. Several routers allow external attackers to delete files on USB storage devices, and others facilitate DDoS attacks. About half of the flaws involve Cross Site Scripting and Cross Site Request Forgery capabilities
Summary: COTS Embedded devices don't have security you can rely on, but why is that so? OpenWRT may be an alternative.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 05 2015, @01:10PM
Using old PC as router is efficient and flexible. And enterprise stuff usually comes with a price tag to match. Not fun when a transient fries your enterprise investment. With an old PC you can get a real operating system and thus do subnet management with a low price point.