When the next world war happens it won’t happen at the border. It will happen in our houses, on our computers. Or so does a lot of visionaries have claimed. And doesn’t it become prudent for all of us to be more cautious about our cyber security? But it looks like we are not only not up to date in terms of our cyber security, we are also lagging on many fronts. According to a recent report, many routers have been found to be vulnerable to cyber threats.
Millions of WiFi’s are at the risk of getting hacked
According to security researchers at IoT Inspector and CHIP magazine, millions of WiFi routers from various popular brands may be at risk as about 226 security vulnerabilities were found. These newly discovered security vulnerabilities affect a number of WiFi routers from brands including Netgear, Asus, Synology, D-Link, AVM, TP-Link, and Edimax.
According to IoT Inspector CTO Florian Lukavsky, “The test negatively exceeded all expectations for secure small business and home routers. Not all vulnerabilities are equally critical — but at the time of the test, all devices showed significant security vulnerabilities that could make a hacker’s life much easier”
As per the researchers, the major cause of the issue is expected to be a lack of newer components. Older versions of core components (including the Linux kernel) along with other out-of-date services were likely the targets that were exploited by attackers.
Lack of awareness of users is also a reason for cyber attack vulnerability
The report also said that vendors were using simple default passwords on routers that made them easy to guess. As some users use routers with their default credentials, it makes them really easy targets for attackers.
In some cases, SOHO routers were using unencrypted connections in insecure certificates. Over-reliance on older versions of BusyBox, the use of weak default passwords like “admin” and the presence of hard-coded credentials in plain text form are also responsible for these vulnerabilities.
To the relief of many, as soon as the router vulnerabilities were reported to companies, many vendors including (including Asus, D-Link, Edimax, Linksys, Netgear, Synology, and TP-Link) responded quickly by releasing a fix for affected models. To avert any further cyber-attack, users need to update the firmware of their WiFi routers as soon as possible to apply the latest fixes.