Major Home/Small Business Router Vulnerability
[Merrimack, NH] Hackers possibly working for an advanced nation have infected more than 500,000 home and small-office routers around the world with malware that can be used to collect communications, launch attacks on others, and permanently destroy the devices with a single command, researchers at Cisco warned Wednesday.
VPNFilter, as its known, works on consumer-grade routers made by Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear, TP-Link, and on network-attached storage devices from QNAP. It’s one of the few pieces of Internet-of-things malware that can survive a reboot.
“We’ve been seeing a dramatic increase in security compromises in small companies throughout New Hampshire lately. During just the past month we’ve uncovered multiple successful attacks orchestrated by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, state-sponsored attacks from Russia and Iran, and stolen data such as personal information and bank account numbers. Some of these attacks have been directly attributed to these same infrastructure problems,” said Craig Peterson, Mainstream Managed Security’s Founder and CEO. “Now we’ve got at least a half million small business and home networks exposed, and potentially used as a step-stone to attack others. And due to the veracity of the malware, these attacks are unrecoverable and undetectable by most small businesses.”