"If you were given a single box, which most people I think call a gateway," Horowitz said, "you should be able to contact the ISP and have them dumb down the box so that it acts as just a modem. (If you need to get your own modem, check out our recommendations for the best cable modems.) Many ISPs lease such dual-purpose devices to customers, but those customers will have little control over their own home networks. The first step toward home router security, Horowitz said, is to make sure the router and cable modem are not a single device. "It was deliberate, no doubt about it." How to lock down your home router "This is so obviously done by a spy agency, it's amazing," Horowitz said. The port was closed on most affected devices following Vanderbeken's disclosures, but he later found that it could easily be reopened with a specially designed data packet that could be sent from an ISP. Using port 32764, anyone on a local network - which includes a user's ISP - could take full administrative control of a router, and even perform a factory reset, without a password. Then, there's networking port 32764, which French security researcher Eloi Vanderbeken in 2013 discovered had been quietly left open on gateway routers sold by several major brands. "You just need to make 11,000 guesses" - a trivial task for most modern computers and smartphones. "If WPS is active, you can get into the router," Horowitz said. The first four digits are validated as one sequence and the last three as another, resulting in only 11,000 possible codes instead of 10 million. It's actually seven digits plus a final checksum digit. That eight-digit PIN isn't even really eight digits, Horowitz explained. So a plumber comes over to your house, turns the router over, takes a picture of the bottom of it, and he can now get on your network forever." "That eight-digit number will get you into the no matter what. "This is a huge expletive-deleted security problem," Horowitz said. Even if the network password or network name is changed, the PIN remains valid. Worst of all is Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), an ease-of-use feature that lets users bypass the network password and connect devices to a Wi-Fi network simply by entering an eight-digit PIN printed on the router itself. Frankly, if you get any response back, I would throw the router out." The WPS threat "Go to /HNAP1/, and, hopefully, you'll get no response back, if that's the only good thing. "As soon as you get home, this is something you want to do with all your routers," Horowitz told the tech-savvy crowd. ( Linksys quickly issued a firmware patch.) In 2014, a router worm called TheMoon used the HNAP protocol to identify vulnerable Linksys-brand routers to which it could spread itself. In and of itself, it's not such a big deal," Horowitz said.īut, he added, "UPnP on the internet is like going in for surgery and having the doctor work on the wrong leg."Īnother problem is the Home Network Administration Protocol (HNAP), a management tool found on some older consumer-grade routers transmits sensitive information about the router over the Web at IP address]/HNAP1/, and grants full control to remote users who provide administrative usernames and passwords (which many users never change from the factory defaults). "UPnP was designed for LANs, and as such, it has no security. Millions of routers throughout the world, even some of the best ones, have the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) networking protocol enabled on internet-facing ports, which exposes them to external attacks. Some other devices will not accept passwords longer than 16 characters - the minimum length for password safety today. Many consumer-grade home-gateway devices fail to notify users if and when firmware updates become available, even though those updates are essential to patch security holes, Horowitz noted. If you still can't access your router's interface after typing the correct IP address into your web browser's address bar, visit Why can't I access or ?."A compromised router can spy on you," Horowitz said, explaining that a router under an attacker's control can stage a man-in-the-middle attack, alter unencrypted data or send the user to "evil twin" websites masquerading as legitimate ones or even online-banking portals. Your router's IP address displays under Router Information. The user name and password are case-sensitive. Enter the router user name and password.Type into your web browser's address bar.Launch a web browser from a computer or wireless device that is connected to your router's network.If your computer or mobile device is using a static IP address, you need to configure your device to retrieve the IP address. The computer or mobile device that you are using automatically retrieves the IP address from your router. By default, your NETGEAR router's IP address is either 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1.
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