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More Security Problems for Home Wi-Fi

June 11, 2020

As a result of working from home for the past several months, we have to keep reminding ourselves what day it is. A recent study indicates that home networks are 3.5 times more likely to have malware than business networks. As Sharon and I lecture about working securely from home, we give advice such as changing all the default values on your home router and connecting via Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi. The cyber criminals know that many people are connecting to business networks while riding on insecure home networks. They are attacking those weaknesses. Besides disabling all remote administration for your router, we recommend shutting off the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol too.

UPnP is an easy way for devices to connect to the router without knowing anything about how to configure communication ports. Like the words say, vendors are trying to make things plug and play. This means that many more internal devices are allowed to connect to external services without any authentication. Unfortunately, UPnP has been riddled with vulnerabilities for years. Naked Security reported another UPnP vulnerability named CallStranger (who makes up these names?) that impacts billions of devices. Just turn off UPnP and you won't have to worry about this latest vulnerability or any future ones.

Email: Phone: 703.359.0700
Digital Forensics/Cybersecurity/Information Technology
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