Hackers have published more than 500,000 passwords and IP addresses of routers, servers and IoT devices from a providers database for DDoS attacks. The data itself comes from last year and can be misused through a connection from the remote maintenance service. The data sets were published in a well-known forum for hackers after they were copied from one of the servers of the unnamed DDoS provider.
Networks, DDoS Attacks And Destroyed IoT Devices
Buyers of the data from the hacker forum can use the access data of the routers and servers- to set up bot networks and use them to carry out their own DDoS attacks. Such data leaks also pose an increased risk of damage to IoT devices, as demonstrated by the malware brickerbot, which has presumably already destroyed several million unsafe IoT devices in order to prevent them from being bombarded by a bot. The malware also deletes the firewall rules and removes the network configuration before it switches off the IoT devices and thus makes them unusable. Even if network watchdogs are also supposed to protect IoT systems, the security measures here are generally not yet high as on the home desktop or mobile computer.
In the current case, networks claim to have informed all affected server operators promptly. At least some of the routers and servers should then have received a new IP address. On the other hand, the situation is worse with the majority of IoT devices, which are usually used privately and administered by users themselves.
To ensure the security of your WLAN router, you should ensure that updates for the firmware are always installed promptly. In many cases, these bring fixes for security vulnerabilities. In addition, you should regularly change both the WiFi password and the login for the router configuration. The passwords that were leaked on the affected routers and IoT devices are the same from many manufacturers as in the router’s web interface. It is therefore advisable to delete the standard login here and choose a secure password – ideally one that was generated by a good password manager.
