Your Wi-Fi Network’s Soft Underbelly
You probably don’t spend much time thinking about your wireless router—until it stops working, that is. Our inattention to routers has been a security problem for years, most recently last week when Brian Krebs reported that researchers at the Fujitsu Security Operations Center had discovered hundreds of routers were being used to spread a financial fraud malware called Dyre.
The researchers speculated that the vulnerabilities were likely due to users not changing the default credentials for their routers, making them easily accessible to criminals. To be clear, your wireless router password is different from your wireless network password—the former protects administrative access to the router, which allows you to configure its settings, and the latter protects access to the wireless network itself. But someone who has administrative access to your router can completely compromise the machine—and not just any machine, one that your devices most likely accept packets through every day. That may mean transmitting malware, like Dyre, but compromised routers can also affect pretty much every element of your online experience—for instance, an attacker might compromise your router in order to change your network’s domain name system settings, so that you are misdirected to fraudulent or malicious websites when you type in familiar URLs.
