Top Wi-Fi routers easy to hack, study shows

A recent report has shown that the majority of off the shelf Wi-Fi routers can easily be hacked by someone who knows what they're doing. The report, made by research firm Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) of Baltimore, found that 13 of the most popular off-the-shelf wireless routers could be exploited by a "moderately skilled adversary with LAN or WLAN access".

According to the report, eleven of the 13 can be taken over from a Wide-Area Network (WAN) such as a wireless network, with two of those requiring no active management session. Compromised routers are quite valuable to hackers, since it allows them to intercept the traffic of anyone on that network. If the traffic is unencrypted, it can be viewed.

Man-in-the-middle attacks can let a hacker launch more sophisticated attacks on all users in the router's domain, ISE said. Hackers can perform attacks such as sniffing and rerouting non-SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) traffic, tampering with DNS (Domain Name System) settings and conducting distributed denial-of-service attacks.

"What's notable about this is that if you compromise the router, then you're inside the firewall. You can pick credit card numbers out of e-mails, confidential documents, passwords, photos, just about anything," said ISE's marketing head, Ted Harrington.

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