NSA Warned Everyone to Reboot Their Routers

36 points
1/21/1970
a day ago
by saikatsg

Comments


rayiner

I wonder what the prevalence of these IoT devices is doing to internet security. Your router firewall might prevent incoming connections, but these stupid devices are always dialing out to god knows where. Can that be used to compromise security?

I recently installed deep packet inspection in my firewall and it’s quite illuminating to see all of what’s going on. Why are devices in my home connecting to India?

a day ago

hollow-moe

I made a separate wifi network for the smart trash, they can't see each other and aren't allowed any ingress or egress. I then add individual firewall rules on a needed basis.

a day ago

nemosaltat

This is the way. Mine’s called Io(shi)T.

a day ago

goolz

Similar vibes to a single, older, creepy gentleman telling a group of young school children at the park not to talk to strangers.

a day ago

throawayonthe

links to this NSA press release dated April 7th https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Press-Releases-Statements/Pre...

a day ago

Surac

so NSA installed a backdoor to each router and now needs you to restart it to open the backdoor?

a day ago

hulitu

No, the old one wasn't good tested and it hang the router. They will send a new one OTA on the next reboot.

a day ago

cmehdy

TP-link routers. Entirely unsurprising.

a day ago

nubinetwork

"Replace outdated routers" yeah good luck with that, they're all banned.

a day ago

ohnei

What happens if an American orders a router from Aliexpress? In the past the US generally ignored low volume end user imports..

a day ago

rcbdev

> "Replace outdated routers" yeah good luck with that, they're all banned.

Where on earth are routers banned?

a day ago

neuronexmachina

New models of foreign-made routers (i.e. all of them) were recently banned by the US FCC: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/foreign-made-wi-f...

a day ago

ErroneousBosh

America. They're turning the country into a post-technological theocracy.

a day ago

[deleted]
a day ago

burnt-resistor

In this day and age, and we still lack formally-proven, FOSS/FOSHW, minimal consumer edge routers and WiFi APs.

a day ago

unfitted2545

OpenWRT One? Not sure about AP's though.

a day ago

burnt-resistor

There's no meaningful, usable formally-proven FOSS OS. Being FOSS isn't enough.

13 hours ago

mindslight

Personally I just gave up trying to maintain OpenWRT/whatever on the embedded ARM dumpster fire, and went back to using a generic Linux distro (NixOS) on amd64 machines for both router and APs (with appropriate minipcie wifi cards).

a day ago

burnt-resistor

An alternative is OPNsense, a minimal FreeBSD and Deciso supports an enterprise distribution-quality of it affordable by mere mortals.

13 hours ago

hulitu

This is by design. Those who control the past (network traffic), control the future (network traffic).

a day ago

Craighead

Reminder, HN, you all live in the real world. Chinese state sponsored cyber threat actors use orb networks that are primarily made via strung together off the shelf routers. The literal companies that build and maintain these ORB networks also resell this capability to Russian military intelligence and cyber threat actors.

a day ago

rglover

Was unfamiliar with orb networks. This [1] is a damn clever attack vector.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/chi...

a day ago

mindslight

They just made up a fancy term for the age old proxy... Basically lifting the longstanding criticism of their "attribution" into their realm of bespoke nouns as if it's something exceptional.

(I also found it extra annoying as my current working expansion of ORB is O-Ring Boss)

a day ago

blitzar

I am interested in hearing more about the US state sponsored cyber threat actors

a day ago

Craighead

Fast16, stuxnet, apt-c-40

a day ago