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Thirteen popular routers including the Netgear Centria WNDR4700 pictured here were tested and found vulnerable to hacks in a new study by research firm Independent Security Evaluators. Dong Ngo/CNET The Wi-Fi router you use to broadcast a private wireless Internet signal in your home or office is not only easy to hack, but the best way to protect yourself is out of your hands.
The report, written by research firm Independent Security Evaluators of Baltimore, found that 13 of the most popular off-the-shelf wireless routers could be exploited by a 'moderately skilled adversary with LAN or WLAN access.' It also concludes that your best bet for safer Wi-Fi depends on router vendors upping their game. All 13 routers evaluated can be taken over from the local network, with four of those requiring no active management session. Eleven of the 13 can be taken over from a (WAN) such as a wireless network, with two of those requiring no active management session. My router's not safe?
'It is not a safe assumption to make that you're safe,' Steve Bono, the company's CEO and principal security analyst, told CNET in a phone interview. Before you dismiss router hacks as exceptionally rare, it's important to note that they've been a small but growing segment of computer security threats. In 2011, one firmware vulnerability affecting six hardware manufacturers combined with two malicious scripts and 40 malicious DNS servers to, with the goal of stealing bank and credit card information. Craig Heffner, a vulnerability analyst at Maryland-based Tactical Network Solutions, said that he isn't familiar with the Brazil story but isn't surprised by it. 'In a lot of countries, there's only one or two ISPs, and you get whatever router they give you,' he said. 'They often enable remote administration by default, so any vulnerability would be amplified.'
Related stories:. And just yesterday, ReadWrite reported on, based in part on research conducted by security firm Rapid7.
ISE's study, while similar, reports 'all-new findings,' said ISE's marketing head, Ted Harrington. Harrington further explained why router hacking could turn into a big problem. 'What's notable about this is that if you compromise the router, then you're inside the firewall.
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You can pick credit card numbers out of e-mails, confidential documents, passwords, photos, just about anything,' he said. He added that ISE plans to release additional information from the study in the coming weeks, following the routine security community best practice of giving vendors a chance to respond to vulnerabilities that have been uncovered before publishing them. 'We notified all vendors about all vulnerabilities that we found,' said ISE security analyst Jake Holcomb. 'We're in the process of receiving (CVE) numbers' for tracking information security vulnerabilities. Some vendors, Holcomb said, got back to ISE quickly and had beta firmware with fixes ready to test within 72 hours.
'Other vendors escalated their Tier 1 support up the chain but we never heard back from them,' he said. Belkin's latest Advance N900 DB Wireless Dual-Band N+ Router. Belkin Darren Kitchen, founder of the security and tinkering show and a maker of, said he isn't surprised by the results of the study.
Routers are 'low-powered devices, most made in China and Taiwan, and they're rushed out the door. There's not a consumer demand for security; it's not a feature that will sell it.' Wireless under attack ISE found the routers were vulnerable to three kinds of attacks:. Trivial attacks can be launched directly against the router with no human interaction or access to credentials. Unauthenticated attacks require some form of human interaction, such as following a malicious link or browsing to an unsafe page, but do not require an active session or access to credentials.
Authenticated attacks require that the attacker have access to credentials (or that default router credentials are used - an all-too-common situation) or that a victim is logged in with an active session at the time of the attack. The attacks were performed under both local adversary and remote adversary situations. A remote adversary is a threat that is not connected to the router via Wi-Fi, while the local adversary is. The most common form of successful attack ISE used was the 'one-click attack' known as a.
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Holcomb explained the testing methodology went beyond one-click attacks in an e-mail to CNET: Cross-site request forgery was the first component of all of our attacks. After that, our standard attack was to reset the administrative password to a known value, or add a new administrator, and then enable remote management.
Only when this was not possible (e.g., some routers require the old password as part of the request to change it) did we try other attacks. Those included: shell command injection, directory traversal to share the root of the filesystem over an Internet-accessible ftp server, exploiting a race condition to upload shell scripts over ftp and then have them execute, enabling additional vulnerable services, and some more. There are more vulnerabilities in the routers, and we're disclosing those, too, but they're not necessarily part of this report we're publishing.
While none of the trivial attacks - the weakest ones - worked from a remote adversary, they were successful about one-third of the time from a local attacker. Unauthenticated attacks were rarely successful from a remote attacker, but locally reached the same level of completion as local trivial attacks. Authenticated attacks were almost always successful from both adversaries. 'When you're remote, there's very little attack surface,' explained Tactical Network Solutions' Heffner.
Routers tested included units such as the Linksys WRT310Nv2, Netgear WNDR4700, Belkin N300 and N900, TP-Link WR1043N, and Verizon Actiontec, but Heffner cautioned that this was no guarantee that your router wouldn't be affected. 'In my experience. You should worry about your router. If my device is in this list, you should be concerned. If not, you still may want to be concerned, although it's more difficult to say.' Most routers' Web-interfaces come with similar items and are self-explanatory.
Dong Ngo/CNET The report noted several caveats. Client-side attacks were considered fair game, as long as they were running in a browser and based in HTML and JavaScript. The routers were not extensively tested for other vulnerabilities, and none of them had the remote administration features activated by default. This means that although many modern routers come with the ability to control them when not directly connected to the network, that feature is not active by default. Activating it decreases the router's security level.
Also, before testing, the firmware for all the routers tested was upgraded to the most recent version. What you can do There's not much outside of common-sense behavior that you can do to make your router more secure.
Dong Ngo, a CNET Reviews senior associate technology editor and a wireless networking expert, was skeptical that many people would be affected by router hacks - provided they follow some basic steps for securing their router. Part 5 of his has some advanced security tips from Step 4 onward. 'Since there are certain requirements to be met for these hacking methods to be successful, if you set up your router properly, and practice prudence while being online, chances are you're safe.' ISE analyst Jake Thompson also has some easy-to-implement tips, including some obvious ones like making sure that you change the router's default username and password credentials. However, he cautioned, not all router firmware lets you change the username. 'We also recommend that people use WPA2' security protocol, over WEP, he said. ISE chief Bono advised that people change the router's IP address to be non-standard when possible, while Holcomb added that good precautions to take include updating your firmware after buying your router, and clearing your browser cache and cookies after changing any router settings.
You can create up to 4 main Wi-Fi networks on each of the router's two frequency bands. Dong Ngo/CNET Meanwhile, Kitchen of Hak5 recommends that people make their own routers entirely. 'The best that a person can do is to roll their own using the Marin, Ca.-based, which takes any spare PC and turns it into a wireless router.' He also recommends and.
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Heffner at Tactical Network Solutions agreed. 'The best thing you can do is install a third-party firmware, such as or,' he said.
But the most important fixes must come from router vendors, according to ISE, because they can ensure that security fixes get installed more easily than end-users, who rarely consider the security implications of their router. Changes to vendor behavior that Bono said he'd like to see include not only making firmware updates available, but setting firmware to automatically update like any other modern operating system.
Failing that, the report advocates notifying registered users on how to upgrade the firmware themselves, and for vendors to perform regular device security audits. Updates, according to ISE, currently lack digitally signed updates that can be verified by the router. Free nissan repair manual download. Bono was bearish on router vendor responses.
'We have to start looking at these routers as a critical security component. Some of the vendors told us that their routers are older and no longer supported,' he said. The problem with routers is that they're actually fairly good at what they do, and can take years to fail and be replaced.
'They're just going to sit on the network for five years,' he complained. And Heffner was less polite. 'Vendors need to hire people who know how to code and have higher quality products that ship. That's not very high on the their priority list, but maybe that'll change in the future.'
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CERT comes knocking, it seems unwise for a company to stick its head in the sand and hide. But that's reportedly what happened when the CERT division of the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute tried to contact Belkin about discovered in home automation devices. CERT was contacted by researchers from IOActive after they 'multiple vulnerabilities in Belkin WeMo Home Automation devices that could affect over half a million users.' Since Belkin failed to issue a fix for any of the flaws, IOActive 'recommends unplugging all devices from the affected WeMo products.'
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If you've dropped any money into, such as Belkin WeMo switch and motion, WeMo Light switch, Insight switch and WeMo switch, then you are probably not pleased or fond of the idea of unplugging your WeMo versions of home automation. With apps for both and to make setup quick and easy, WeMo products are some of the most popular home automation devices on the market. However, according to the CERT, 'A remote unauthenticated attacker may be able to sign malicious firmware, relay malicious connections, or access device system files to potentially gain complete access to the device.' Furthermore, 'We are currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem.' Learn about. Get the latest from CSO. There are five separate vulnerabilities listed in CERT's, starting with 'Belkin Wemo Home Automation firmware contains a hard-coded cryptographic key and password.
An attacker may be able to extract the key and password to sign a malicious firmware update.' IOActive researchers published a five-page report detailing the WeMo flaws, but warned in simple terms that the WeMo vulnerabilities 'expose users to several potentially costly threats, from home fires with possible tragic consequences down to the simple waste of electricity.' Additionally, once an attacker has established a connection to a WeMo device within a victim's network; the device can be used as a foothold to attack other devices such as laptops, mobile phones, and attached network file storage.
IOActive is far from the first to warn about WeMo's hackability; in January 2013, researcher Daniel Buentello and 'made it blink like it was possessed, with the relay clicking on and off, faster and faster like it might blow up until it had a strobe effect.' In October 2013, a researcher highlighted security flaws in Belkin's WeMo Switch, Wi-Fi NetCam and WeMo Baby that. Of course it's not just WeMo; at the 2013 Black Hat Home Invasion v2.0 presentation, Trustwave researchers.as well as a $6,000 Satis smart toilet.
In fact, targeting Zigbee and Z-wave wireless protocols, were hot topics in 2013 at Black Hat USA and Def Con. In August 2013, an attacker hacked a to. The Internet of Things is expected to be 'roughly equal to the number of smartphones, smart TVs, tablets, wearable computers, and PCs combined,' according to a.
There are currently about 1.9 billion IoT devices, but that's predicted to reach 9 billion by 2018. Cisco predicts the IoT will grow to 50 billion devices by 2020. Have you ever stopped to wonder how many of those 9 - 50 billion IoT devices will be insecure and exploitable? Belkin had better get its head out of the sand and patch these holes lickety-split because you know not everyone will hear about the flaws or bother to toss out their WeMo investment even if they do.
If half of the people don't, and WeMo is hacked or were to cause fires in all those, about a quarter of a million homes.now that would be an ugly lawsuit. Get busy, Belkin!.Update: Belkin reached out and responded to me regarding this article. Unplugging your WeMo products won’t be necessary because Belkin fixed the security flaws. Here’s the good news and.
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