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from the flash-alternate-router-firmware-for-protection dept.
janrinok writes "A recent survey carried out by Tripwire, reported by the BBC, claims that "80% of the 25 best-selling routers available on Amazon are vulnerable to compromise". Security researcher Craig Young from Tripwire said exploits had been publicly discussed and published for more than one-third of these devices.
In a separate report, the Internet Storm Center (ISC) warned about a continuing attempt to exploit a vulnerability in 23 separate models of Linksys routers. A worm, called 'The Moon' is compromising Linksys routers and then scans for other potentially vulnerable systems. So far, wrote ISC researcher Johannes Ullrich in his blogpost, it is not clear why the routers are being compromised and what might be done with them. There are hints in the exploit code that the routers will at some point be gathered together into a network of compromised machines. Currently, he added, all the worm was doing was spreading to other Linksys routers.
The reason for the current European concern is a recent large scale attack on home routers in order to gather usernames and passwords for online bank accounts, reported by the Polish Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) and elsewhere."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2014, @11:18PM
Something to consider even for routers not on such a list is that some wireless routers have WPS on by default. WPS uses an eight digit PIN that can be cracked with a tool called Reaver. Once cracked, Reaver also tells you the wireless connection password. It took 31 hours on my core-i7 laptop to crack my own WPS PIN, but once cracked, I was also shown my WPA2 password. I'm able to turn WPS off in my gateway (rented from Comcast), but I've read that some routers will not turn the WPS off even though they indicate that it is off in the router settings.