What You Need to Know About Router Security Flaws

About this article: According to a report—and a bit of detective work—by The Wall Street Journal (around the end of 2015), hundreds of thousands of routers in use by consumers have operating flaws that make them vulnerable to hackers. They’re not only vulnerable—they’re also easy targets for hackers who know about the vulnerabilities. The sad news is, there’s nothing that you have done wrong…except for perhaps buying the wrong router at the wrong time. Here’s what you need to know. It’s possible that you have a router with a security flaw, but it came like that—the flaw is in the software that runs the router and helps it to communicate with your computer and networks. In its special report, The Wall Street Journal found an interesting example of this. A router company was notified by a security expert that there was a bug (flaw) in one of its programs that “put millions worldwide in danger of being hacked.” But here was the interesting part: The company had fixed that software problem earlier—in fact, 10 years earlier. So what went wrong? That one example is typical of the kinds of problems that plague the technology world. Even if a software company finds a problem and releases a software “patch” to fix it—or completely updates the software—that news and that fix may never make it to you. Fixing bugs has proven to be complicated, especially in the world of routers: But that’s where the problems begin: You might be one of the unlucky—and unsuspecting—router users caught in this cycle, a victim of the security flaw in a router that never got fixed. And there are hundreds of thousands caught up in the problem: Maybe it’s time to do a little Internet research to see if your router has been in the news as far as security flaws go. Or if your router is three to five years old, perhaps it’s time to get a new one anyway. In any case, do a little homework or talk to someone who knows about networking before you shop. When it comes to Internet security, you want to make sure your equipment isn’t going to let you down.