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Worm breeds botnet from home routers, modems

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on · 5 comments
The Register; By Dan Goodin 		Mail this story
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Security researchers have identified a sophisticated piece of malware that corrals consumer routers and DSL modems into a lethal botnet. The "psyb0t" worm is believed to be the first piece of malware to target home networking gear, according to researchers from DroneBL, which bills itself as a real-time monitor of abusable internet addresses. It has already infiltrated an estimated 100,000 hosts. It has been used to carry out DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attacks and is also believed to use deep-packet inspection to harvest user names and passwords.

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Comments (5)

jezuch ·
If you think about it, home routers and similar stuff are a perfect target for malware: they're rushed to market (probably with little QA and lots of bugs) and never updated. And we're seeing malware targeting it only now? Strange...
tuxtom ·
Good point. We need the government to protect us from that.
jdixon ·
> ...and never updated.

Though apparently updating the firmware fixes the problem, at least on most of these models..
tuxtom ·
@jezuch: I've been to the offices of a company developing consumer-grade wireless routers and I can confirm your observation. They weren't even using source control for the firmware builds..email was it!!! What's Q/A??? Questions and Answers? What are you talking about?
jezuch ·
Quoting:They weren't even using source control for the firmware builds..email was it!!! What's Q/A??? Questions and Answers? What are you talking about?


Now that's scary...

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