The Internet Crime Complaint Center sent a rare Public Service Announcement declaring, "Foreign Cyber Actors have compromised hundreds of thousands of home and office routers and other networked devices worldwide."
A great many security products today are using router connected protocols to connect those devices to internal residential and commercial networks.
Many of these products including (but not limited to) alarm systems, closed circuit television cameras (CCTV), door locks, intercom systems and door bells etc, are often connected to WiFi routers in your home or office.
The nature of today's consumer marketplace appears to be fascinated by the growing Internet of Things (IoT) products that enable many of us to enjoy modern "connected" services that protect us, make our lives easier and keep us in communication range with each other.
The locksmith industry worldwide continues to evolve and many locksmiths today are busy recommending and installing modern "connected" security products, meeting the increasing demands of the marketplace.
Some of these "new generation" products are very good quality and often expensive too. Maintaining the security of your home and business is of paramount importance to protecting our families and our colleagues, aside from our customers.
According to the FBI, hackers are using VPNFilter Malware to target small office and home office routers saying, "VPN Filter is able to render small office and home office routers, inoperable" and are warning, "The malware can potentially also collect information passing through the router. Detection and analysis of the malware's network activity, is complicated by it's use of encryption.".
The FBI recommends, "any owners of small office and home office routers, reboot the devices to temporarily disrupt the malware and aid the potential identification of infected devices".
They also advise to consider disabling remote management settings on devices, use encryption and choose new and different passwords.
With the increasing number of "connected devices" in the wider market, security of your home, office and other connected products are potentially gravely affected by this new hack.
We suggest that all our customers and anyone using or relying on Internet Connected devices, including your door locks, your CCTV systems, your alarm systems and your door bells or intercoms, to immediately perform a soft reset of your WiFi routers. This action will temporarily mitigate the malware's operation. It may not completely remove the malware from an infected router and if you are further concerned, we suggest you perform a factory hard reset of the router.
We have been writing about security issues with IoT devices, in increasing articles in the last 12 months.
Some of these articles include:
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