Vulnerabilities found in Virgin Media routers, which could lead to hackers gaining access to Smart Appliances within the home.
800,000 Virgin Media customers have found themselves vulnerable to potentially being hacked. The hackers are able to gain access to smart homes via Virgin Media’s Hub 2 router.
Through this router, the hackers could gain access and potentially control any Internet of Things devices in and around the home, with items such as a child’s toy and domestic CCTV cameras being compromised.
The company asserts that security of their costumers and the network is of upmost importance and that the risk of being compromised is small, but it is still a risk. Virgin Media is now urging customers to change their passwords to their routers in order to protect themselves from being hacked.
Internet of Things devices have boomed onto the market over the past couple of years, with most appliances and devices now being ‘smart’, offering huge benefits inside, and outside, the home.
However, these appliances are vulnerable and offer little to no security leaving customers wide open to be compromised by cyber criminals.
You can easily protect your home through a number of steps, although they cannot guarantee security, as hackers are getting more sophisticated with their attacks, but it does create a barrier, which they would have to attempt to break.
Mark James, ESET IT Security Specialist, discusses the lack of security on new devices, and how customers can help themselves, in terms of cyber security.
“As we embrace more and more Internet of Things devices and come to expect the ability to connect anything and everything, no matter where we are it stands to reason that companies want to make things as easy as possible for the user to embrace quickly and easily.
“That’s where it can fall apart, security by design requires effort most of the time.
“When we get a nice new shiny device all we want to do is plug it in and expect it to work.
“When we are presented with instructions to change passwords and even usernames, for some it may seem a little too much effort but if we want to stay safe we have to make these changes.
“When items are shipped from the manufacturers they have to use a default username and password to enable anyone to configure it.
“We must ensure we change that password immediately, and in the best cases we should be forced to change it before we continue.
“A good thought process should be along the lines of ‘any password created by someone else is a bad password.’”
Have you changed your router password from the default? Let us know on Twitter @ESETUK.
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