Avast Blog Tips & Advices: Routers: a vulnerable opening to your home and personal da

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If hackers get to your router, they can access all the connected devices in your home. Here’s what you need to know.

Wireless routers are perhaps the most fundamental piece of technology required for an internet-connected house. Seventy-six percent of households in the US use Wi-Fi as the primary means of connecting to the internet, and routers give us our Wi-Fi. But once our connections are established, the router is often just part of the furniture; we don’t even think about it.

Should we be paying more attention to the devices that, for so many of us, are our primary means of accessing the online world? Yes, we should.

Malware targeted specifically at routers increased throughout 2018, yet Avast research shows that 51% of people have never logged into their router’s administration page. Even more surprising, 72% of people have never even updated their routers’ firmware. According to similar research by Broadband Genie, the most common reason people give for not paying attention to their routers is “I don’t know why I would need to.” Let’s look at why we do need to.

Why are routers attacked?

Data theft

Wi-Fi hijacking or ‘wi-jacking’ is a security issue that some of us might have encountered in a very limited form: Our neighbors leeching our internet signal. Giving free bandwidth to mooching neighbors is a nuisance, but this can become a much more malicious issue. If hackers are able to gain control of a router, they can – and do – redirect your internet traffic to data-harvesting domains, potentially gaining access to your personal or financial information.

Direct router attacks

Direct attacks on individual routers can happen. Compromised routers are often employed as part of malicious botnets, which can be turned into a variety of nefarious purposes such as DDOS attacks and cryptojacking.

DDoS attacks

One of the easiest and most effective things hackers can use these botnets to hijack your device for is DDoS attacks against websites. Since routers are hubs which directly handle a household’s internet traffic, they’re perfectly suited to be the vulnerable opening that gives you access to the devices for a DDoS style attack, which overwhelm the target server with requests and takes it down.

Cryptojacking

Cryptojacking is becoming more and more popular with cybercriminals, as the power of botnets to mine crypto-currencies like Monero and Bitcoin becomes more widely-used. Over the first half of 2018, cryptojacking malware detections increased by 459%. Routers are playing a significant part in this, with up to 415,000 devices across the world infected by cryptomining malware in 2018.

Cryptomining with your own computer is not an illegal practice; but nor is it lucrative. However, harnessing the power of thousands of other people’s devices and using their electricity is an altogether more attractive proposition for criminals.

Routers are an easy opening

However, the most significant reason that routers are increasingly targeted is simply that they are so much easier to compromise than other devices. With the general state of security in web applications and mobile devices improving, router vulnerabilities are becoming a more valuable target. Organizations that hunt for zero-day vulnerabilities to sell to government agencies or as part of bug bounties are expanding their efforts to routers. But if routers are so easy to hack, what kind of malicious campaigns have we seen with them?

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