Hack lets intruders sneak into home routers
Joris Evers writes in CNET News.com about an all-too-common mistake many home and small-business users make when setting up their routers. From the article:
If you haven’t changed the default password on your home router, let this recent threat serve as a reminder.
We’ve seen far too many wide-open wireless networks in our travels to doubt the validity of this concept.
If you are not sure what steps you should take to secure your wireless router, The DailyWireless website offers a fairly comprehensive set of instructions. These instructions, along with a read-through of your specific router’s user manual should give you enough information to properly secure your wireless network if you’re fairly technically astute.
In addition, we highly recommend configuring your router to use the free OpenDNS servers. From their website:
OpenDNS uses its distributed network of DNS servers to speed up your Internet experience, increase reliability, improve security and make DNS smarter for users all over the world.
We’ve found these statements to all be true in practice. If you are not sure what DNS is or how it works, OpenDNS has a great Frequently Asked Questions section.
And, as always, we’d be happy to help you with any network setup questions or needs you have. Contact us if we can be of assistance!
February 17th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Thanks for bringing this work to peoples’ attention. One quick thing I wanted to clarify is that the attack is not necessarily limited to wireless routers. The same methodology could be applied both wired and wireless routers (so long as the attacker can guess the password). Some more information can be found on the Symantec Security Response Blog…
Thanks much,
Zulfikar
February 19th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Thanks, Zulfikar - Wired routers aren’t as popular among home and small-business users, but they are certainly out there. The post has been edited accordingly. Please stop by and comment any time, and thanks for the link!