CNET FBI Wi-Fi Router Hacked List: 5 Steps to Keep Your Router Safe Now

Joe Gwinn informed us about

This webpage says: "The FBI’s announcement on the attack specifically recommends that organizations with remote workers use a VPN when accessing sensitive data. These services encrypt your traffic as it passes through a remote server, keeping it safe from hackers."

Contrast with that self-contradictory baloney from the International Criminal Court from

- "Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the Office of the Prosecutor (“OTP”) may analyse information on alleged crimes within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and aggression), submitted to it from any source. [. . .] [. . .] Please be mindful not to use a VPN or Proxy during your submission process."

Cf. the online Summer School on the International Criminal Court 2026 of "the Irish Centre for Human Rights" of non-"University of Galway is a registered charity" demands money when it clearly has enough money! Cf.

(S.

A decade ago, I standardized on old Netgear WNDR3700v4 routers from eBay, running OpenWRT. Still running the uplevel version—Good Medicine.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

"Avoiding wires" comes at a cost.

How often do you update/replace EVERY COTS device in your network to ensure one doesn't end up a beachhead?

This is made more difficult when something like the Intel "AMT" or other sorts of "digital management" technologies have built-in to steal and secret packets from the NIC and to make silent installs of hypervisors over virts the usual sort of account of boot medium. It's like every PC should have instructions to connect to the device and make sure the AMT password is something you set then as with regards to all the disk or block devices and all the RAM to basically exercise right of first refusal on the hardware.

Then "Power over Ethernet" and similarly about Wi-Fi, which is also an Ethernet standard, and about things like Netboot and PXE, where Netboot will happily point to any synthetic networking TFTP boot media is finds, that being bad enough aboat breaking in to computers, the usual idea that all the PC's are virted with "Zen" or "Xen" or whatever it is, here is that "virted" is a bit more devious than "rooted".

Then those TP-Link routers were pretty simple, just running BusyBox and an old way-slimmed down runtime of Linux over bare metal, probably they don't play with the hackers who are un-entitled snowflakes of the laugh-at-others-ignorance-while-stealing-from-them variety.

These days the PC's and other sorts of devices, to make for more of an "appliance" model of things, need to get their "digital management" controlled, then for example an operating system that more or less is resistant to meddling, then to write and audit their own network stack, as with regards to being "a good actor on the network", which is the general principle of how Internetworking works, without being "a deaf-mute dupe on the damned device".

Here there's a perceived requirement to write a nice O.S. for commodity hardware and architectures anyways, since the modern architecture is as of a model of a distributed system instead of the monolithic controller, as then that what goes on in the digital management (a stow-away chip running Minix on the bus making some RAM un-usable, usually) and about the UEFI and it's notions of boot-time protocols, they're stow-aways and free-loaders.

If even _I've_ heard of this then it's not a secret, then that matters of monoculture over hygiene have that according to Murphy the chicken-farmer they just irrationally hope that a crow with crow-vid never sneezes.

Then, about VPN, there are lots of different approaches to VPN, and the one that just tunnels to a gateway through TLS, has that any sort of synthetic networking and system trust store breach are just a usual account after synthetic networking, often enough "auto-proxy config" yet just built in to the ARP and RARP and RIP and such.

It probably goes back to SNMP "simple network management protocol" and MIB's "management information blocks", these days the DMTF "digital management task force" basically wrapped that in TLS and its has all sorts of schemas of meta-data.

Then there are protocols like SIP and SMIL, variously wrongly configured or under-documented, after things like NAT and BGP and OSPF, that a "router" in the soho environment usually also is the gateway and furthermore the firewall, it should also be a ready sort of diagnostic of the networking landscape, since in these days of IPv4 and IPv6 vis-a-vis NAT and BGP about the AS's and the like, a certain sort of network hygiene and along the lines of peer-protocols could help a lot in making for sane and direct internetworking.

Then for soho routers acting as responsible actors on the network, that can be so without being deaf-mute dupes that readily surface all sorts of media input. The banned devices probably are "insecure in the wrong way" with regards to the commodity ecosystem of in-security.

About Wi-Fi then it's not easy to just get computers without Wi-Fi, since for example some people are against radio noise in the environment, yet some offerings still have you just open the case and disconnect the Wi-Fi board.