Hack lets intruders sneak into home routers
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Ability to change the settings of poorly configured home routers could put home networks at risk of serious attack.
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(InfoWorld) - If you haven't changed the default password on your home router, do so now. That's what researchers at Symantec and Indiana University are saying, after publishing the results of tests that show how attackers could take over your home router using malicious JavaScript code. For the attack to work, the bad guys would need a couple of things to go their way. First, the victim would have to visit a malicious Web site that served up the JavaScript. Second, the victim's router would have to still use the default password that it's pre-configured with it out of the box. In tests, the researchers were able to do things like change firmware and redirect a D-Link Systems DI-524 wireless router to look up Web sites from a DNS (Domain Name System) server of their choosing. They describe these attacks in a paper, authored by Sid Stamm and Markus Jakobsson of Indiana University, and Symantec's Zulfikar Ramzan. "By visiting a malicious Web page, a person can inadvertently open up his router for attack," the researchers write. "A Web site can attack home routers from the inside and mount sophisticated... attacks that may result in denial of service, malware infection, or identity theft." Once the router has been compromised, victims can be redirected to fraudulent Web sites, the researchers say. So instead of downloading legitimate Microsoft software updates, for example, they could be tricked into downloading malware. Instead of online banking, they could be giving up sensitive information to phishers. At the heart of the problem is the fact that consumer routers ship with simple, well-known default passwords, like "admin," which could be exploited by attackers. "Owners of home routers who set a moderately secure password -- one that is non-default and non-trivial to guess -- are immune to router manipulation via JavaScript," the paper states. The researchers blame router makers for shipping products with "poorly secure default settings." Vendors like D-Link and Cisco Systems are aware of the problem. "It's a concern to us," said Karen Sohl, a spokeswoman with Cisco's Linksys group. "We've shipped about 30 million routers and we want those 30 million customers to understand why it's so important to change [the default password]." Both Cisco and D-Link said they've taken steps to avoid this type of security problem. Over the past few years they've introduced step-by-step "wizard" software to configure their routers, and these products always suggest that the user come up with a unique password. The problem is that the routers still work if the password is left as default. And that's not likely to change anytime soon, according to Michael Scott, D-Link's technical media manager. Users wouldn't buy routers that forced them to enter unique passwords, he said. "That would only result in returned products, and then they would buy one of our competitors products," he said.
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It's a hacker's nightmare but a dream for bankers and spies: A computer network so secure that even the simplest attempts to eavesdrop will interrupt the flow of data and alert administrators to the snooping.
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Unknown attacker breaks into a WordPress server and adds a remote control tool to downloadable versions of widely used blogging software.
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Universal plug and prey Security mavens have uncovered a design flaw in most home routers that allows attackers to remotely control the devices by luring an attached computer to a booby-trapped website.â¦
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Security researchers have released code showing how a pair of widely used technologies could be misused to take control of a victim&#39;s Web browsing experience.The code, published over the weekend by researchers Adrian Pastor and Petko Petkov, exploits features in two technologies: The UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) protocol, which is used by many operating systems to make it easier for them to work with devices on a network, and Adobe Systems&#39; Flash multimedia software.By tricking a victim into viewing a malicious Flash file, an attacker could use UPnP to change the primary DNS server used by the router to find other computers on the Internet. This would give the attacker a virtually undetectable way to redirect the victim to fake Web sites. For example, a victim with a compromised router could be taken to the attacker&#39;s Web server, even if he typed Citibank.com directly into the Web browser navigation bar.&quot;The most malicious of all malicious things is to change the primary DNS server,&quot; the researchers wrote. &quot;That will effectively turn the router and the network it controls into a zombie which the attacker can take advantage of whenever they feel like it.&quot;Because so many routers support UPnP, the researchers believe that &quot;99 percent of home routers are vulnerable to this attack.&quot;In fact, many other types of UPnP devices, such as printers, digital entertainment systems, and cameras are also potentially at risk, they added in a Frequently Asked Questions Web page explaining their research.The attack is particularly worrisome because it is cross-platform -- any operating system that supports Flash is susceptible -- and because it is based on features of UPnP and Flash, not bugs that could be easily fixed by Adobe or the router vendors.Users could avoid this attack by turning UPnP off on their routers, where it is normally enabled by default, but this would cause a variety of popular applications, such as IM software, games, and Skype, to break and require manual configuration on the router.Adobe could make changes to Flash to mitigate the problem, but attackers could most likely also launch this attack using another technique, known as DNS pinning, said Aviv Raff, a researcher who has also blogged about the attack.&quot;This is a critical issue,&quot; he said in an IM interview. &quot;People should turn off UPnP in their devices, and vendors should put UPnP disabled by default in the devices they deliver.&quot;Although this could make life difficult for nontechnical users, Raff believes it would be worth the effort. &quot;It&#39;s better than having your traffic owned by malicious people,&quot; he said.However, another security expert said that turning off UPnP would be overkill, considering that online criminals have not even begun using this attack. &quot;Look... if you get hit by a meteor, it&#39;s devastating,&quot; said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with Grisoft. &quot;But no one goes around building meteor shelters.&quot;
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Alternative form of high-speed Internet access makes its way to U.S. homes.
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If you haven't changed the default password on your home router, do so now.
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Preston Gralla provides step-by-step instructions to guard against bad guys trying to hack in to your home or office Wi-Fi network.
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New utility from PivX keeps intruders out of Windows systems.
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If criminals were to target unsecured wireless routers, they could create an attack that could piggyback across thousands of Wi-Fi networks in urban areas like Chicago or New York City, according to researchers at Indiana University.The researchers estimate that a Wi-Fi attack could take over 20,000 wireless routers in New York City within a two-week period, with most of the infections occurring within the first day.&quot;The issue is that most of these routers are installed out of the box very insecurely,&quot; said Steven Myers, an assistant professor at Indiana University, who published the paper in November, along with researchers from the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Torino, Italy,The researchers theorize that attack would work by guessing administrative passwords and then instructing the routers to install new worm-like firmware, which would in turn cause the infected router to attack other devices in its range.Because there are so many closely connected Wi-Fi networks in most urban areas, the attack could hop from router to router for many miles in some cities.The team used what is known as the Susceptible Infected Removed (SIR) model to track the growth of this attack. This methodology is typically used to estimate things like influenza outbreaks, but it has also been used to predict things like computer virus infections, Myers said.Although the researchers did not develop any attack code that would be used to carry out this infection, they believe it would be possible to write code that guessed default passwords by first entering the default administrative passwords that shipped with the router, and then by trying a list of one million commonly used passwords, one after the other. They believe that 36 percent of passwords can be guessed using this technique.Even some routers that use encryption could be cracked, if they use the popular WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) algorithm, which security experts have been able to crack for years now. Routers that were encrypted using the more-secure WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) standard were considered impossible to infect, Myers said.Myers&#39; model is based on data compiled from the Wireless Geographic Logging Engine (WiGLE), a volunteer-run effort to map Wi-Fi networks around the world, which has over 10 million networks in its database.Using this data, they were able to map out large networks of made out of Wi-Fi routers that were each no more than 45 meters (49 yards) from the network -- in other words, close enough for an infection to spread. The largest such network in New York included 36,807 systems; in Boston it was 15,899; and in Chicago: 50,084.Because New York is such a dense city with a relatively low percentage (25.8 percent, according to the researchers) of encrypted routers, it was particularly susceptible to this type of attack. San Francisco, on the other hand, where 40.1 percent of routers are encrypted and which had a lower density of routers was less susceptible.Myers says that because the attack would be technically complex, he doubts that criminals will attempt it any time soon. There are simply too many other, easier ways to take over computers, he said.Still, he thinks hardware makers should take note. &quot;The bigger point for developers and people making wireless information technology is to realize that there are serious security issues.&quot;
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Security researcher demonstrates a way to use cross-site scripting to remotely spam an internal network printer.
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Hackers could exploit the vulnerabilities to launch DOS attacks and bypass user authentication on the servers.
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and doing nothing else â-xposes your PC to non-stop, automated break-in attempts by intruders looking to take control of your machine surreptitiously.
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People sniffing wireless network traffic have many tools at their disposal to intercept sensitive data from PCs.
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If you use a secure wireless network, hackers may be able to steal data from your computer in the time it takes to have a cup of coffee.At the Toorcon hacking conference in San Diego this coming weekend, security researcher Vivek Ramachandran, will demonstrate a technique he&#39;s developed to attack laptops that use the WEP encryption system to log on to secure wireless networks.Developed in the late 1990s, WEP was the default method of securing Wi-Fi networks. Though the WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) system replaced it, about 41 percent of businesses continue to use WEP. That percentage is even higher among home users, security experts say.That&#39;s unfortunate because WEP has been riddled with security problems. In fact, WEP was blamed for the recent&#160;TJX Companies data breach&#160;in which thieves were able to access 45 million credit- and debit-card numbers.To date, however, researchers have tended to focus on exploiting WEP flaws in order to break into wireless networks. That generally meant that the attacker would roll up near the WEP-encrypted router, crack the WEP key used to encrypt network traffic, and then log on to the network.Ramachandran, a senior wireless security researcher with AirTight Networks, has taken a look at the client side of things and developed a way of tricking a WEP-enabled client into thinking that it is logging on to a network that it already knows.His technique, which he calls the Cafe Latte attack, allows an attacker to circumvent firewall protection and attack the laptop or to set up a &quot;man in the middle&quot; attack and snoop on the victim&#39;s online activity. &quot;Until now, the conventional belief was that in order to crack WEP, the attacker had to show up at the parking lot,&quot; he said. &quot;With the discovery of our attack, every employee of an organization is the target of an attack.&quot;There are several steps to Cafe Latte, all of which exploit known flaws in the WEP architecture. First, the attacker programs a laptop computer to act like a malicious wireless network, setting up shop in an Internet cafe or an airport. The malicious PC then begins communicating with other Wi-Fi laptops in range, figuring out the name of the WEP-enabled routers that these laptops are programmed to look for and then cracks the keystream encryption code required to send messages to the victim&#39;s laptop.Knowing the keystream only gets the attacker halfway. To truly crack the WEP encryption key and read messages coming from the victim, the attacker must somehow trick the victim into sending a large amount of information -- about 70,000 messages, actually -- to the malicious network. Those messages could then be analyzed and cracked using WEP-cracking tools.Cafe Latte does this by taking advantage of the way the Internet&#39;s ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) ensures that two computers do not share the same IP address. ARP is used when a new computer joins a LAN to announce the IP address it will be using and to ensure that no other machine shares that address. These network messages are ignored by the victim&#39;s PC unless it shares that address. Then it sends a message back to the attacker&#39;s PC saying that the IP address in question is already being used.Once the attacker gets a response from the victim&#39;s PC, he knows he has guessed the correct IP address and he can bombard the victim&#39;s PC with the same message, essentially saying over and over again &quot;I&#39;m joining the network and I&#39;d like to use this IP address. Are you already using it?&quot;As the victim&#39;s laptop continues to reply, &quot;Yes, I am,&quot; the attacker eventually stores up enough samples of encrypted messages to be able to figure out the WEP key. Now messages from the victim can be read by the attacker.&quot;It&#39;s definitely a novel attack,&quot; said Jon Ellch, a Wi-Fi security researcher who also goes by the name johnny cache. While an attacker could use this WEP key to log on to the victim&#39;s WEP network, the real danger here is from the man-in-the-middle attack, which would let the attacker see everything the victim is doing on the Internet, he added.Still, a victim might notice that something was up during the estimated 30 minutes that Cafe Latte requires in order to crack the WEP key, Ellch said. The attack would have a better chance of succeeding if the laptop were simply turned on and trying to connect to the Wi-Fi network in the background, he said. &quot;If they&#39;re trying to do something with the Internet, obviously it&#39;s not going to pan out so well.&quot;Toorcon runs from Friday to Sunday.
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A new worm has been discovered in the wild that&#39;s not just settling for invading users&#39; PCs--it wants to invade their homes too.