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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2015, @04:45PM
I disagree. Once you setup something like OpenWRT it is fairly non intrusive. However you can not forget about it. You still have to update it. The bugs were already there. They just have not been discovered yet.
Even a toaster needs maintenance. You still have to dump it over and get the crumbs out (or use the tray if you have a nice one). Pretty much everything needs maintenance. You will not be able to change the mind of someone who ignores it. They do not care in the first place.