The Fall 2018 research by the American Consumer Institute found a glaring 83 percent of Wi-Fi routers sold in the U.S. to have security vulnerability. This is an easy door to open for hackers to get control over our devices, leading to malicious activity, identity theft, fraud or espionage. The research undertaken by the American Consumer Institute included 186 devices from 14 manufacturers. Out of that, a mind-blowing 155, or 83 percent, devices were found to have vulnerability in the router's software, with 172 vulnerabilities per router. The American Consumer Institute's research sample had an eye-popping 32,003 total vulnerabilities.
Not all the vulnerabilities are equally severe, and based on National Vulnerability Database's criteria, each vulnerability can be flagged either as a "Low", "Medium", "High", or "Critical" to reflect the degree of associated risk. In the sample used in the study, 28 percent of the vulnerabilities have been categorized as either "High" or "Critical". "High-risk" vulnerabilities require moderate degree of expertise for hackers to compromise the system, but, unlike "Critical" vulnerabilities, they don't entirely compromise the system. The American Consumer Institute study estimated that, on the average, a typical router includes 12 "Critical", 36 "High-risk" and 103 "Medium-risk" vulnerabilities, respectively.
Unfortunately, there is no easy solution to the problem as the responsibility lies equally on the consumer's shoulder. The average consumer, most likely, never thinks of updating their router's software. Since most of the consumers are not aware of updating router's software, the router manufacturers don't provide an easy-to-apply software update for the routers they sell. As a result, even consumers who are aware of security risks posed by outdated router software are likely to face not so "easy-to-update" experience while applying patches to any potential vulnerability in their routers.
Router security risk is all the more important as the usage of the IOT devices has increased multifold in recent years, and, according to Symantec, the IOT-related [devices] vulnerabilities have increased by a whopping 600 percent in 2017 alone, with routers the most common gateway having accounted for nearly 33.6 percent of all incidents. If this growing threat is to be mitigated, manufacturers have to commit more resources and provide easy-to-use patches and updates, while the consumers have to be aware and vigilant of the vulnerability in their Wi-Fi routers.
Not all the vulnerabilities are equally severe, and based on National Vulnerability Database's criteria, each vulnerability can be flagged either as a "Low", "Medium", "High", or "Critical" to reflect the degree of associated risk. In the sample used in the study, 28 percent of the vulnerabilities have been categorized as either "High" or "Critical". "High-risk" vulnerabilities require moderate degree of expertise for hackers to compromise the system, but, unlike "Critical" vulnerabilities, they don't entirely compromise the system. The American Consumer Institute study estimated that, on the average, a typical router includes 12 "Critical", 36 "High-risk" and 103 "Medium-risk" vulnerabilities, respectively.
Unfortunately, there is no easy solution to the problem as the responsibility lies equally on the consumer's shoulder. The average consumer, most likely, never thinks of updating their router's software. Since most of the consumers are not aware of updating router's software, the router manufacturers don't provide an easy-to-apply software update for the routers they sell. As a result, even consumers who are aware of security risks posed by outdated router software are likely to face not so "easy-to-update" experience while applying patches to any potential vulnerability in their routers.
Router security risk is all the more important as the usage of the IOT devices has increased multifold in recent years, and, according to Symantec, the IOT-related [devices] vulnerabilities have increased by a whopping 600 percent in 2017 alone, with routers the most common gateway having accounted for nearly 33.6 percent of all incidents. If this growing threat is to be mitigated, manufacturers have to commit more resources and provide easy-to-use patches and updates, while the consumers have to be aware and vigilant of the vulnerability in their Wi-Fi routers.
No comments:
Post a Comment