“Last week, the FBI released a statement that shocked many — reset your home or office router immediately upon threat of cyberattack,” Luke Larson writes for Digital Trends. “To throw some additional urgency to the matter, the threat was traced back directly to a group connected to the Russian government.”
“It sounds like an easy fix for a major threat, but is resetting your router really going to prevent a major cyberattack?” Larson writes. “Vulnerabilities in routers can be a huge problem, but rebooting the router flushes the short-term memory, and most attacks with it. However, there’s reason to think the recent scare won’t be so easy to solve.”
“According to the FBI, a specific kind of malware called VPNFilter was used, which infected the firmware of routers across the world. The FBI’s statement didn’t much detail as to whether this multi-stage malware might survive the suggested reboot, and that raised the alert of the cybersecurity expert we spoke to,” Larson writes. “‘Until now, we haven’t seen malware on IoT that could survive the reboot,’ said Liviu Arsene, senior analyst at BitDefender. ‘If this malware survives the reboot, it’s a pretty big deal.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: The VPNFilter malware was discovered by Cisco’s security researchers and affects routers made by Linksys, Mikrotik, Netgear, QNAP, and TP-Link, but the FBI urges users of all routers and NAS devices, not just the 14 devices identified by Cisco, to reboot.
Happy router rebooting, everyone!