During his presentation at DefConone of the oldest hacker conferences in the region, Federico Kirschbaum, co-founder and CEO of the Argentine company of cybersecurity, Faraday, announced that his team had found a security flaw in some of the best-selling routers in Latin America that would allow them to be added to criminal networks.
This defect, which affects routers with a Realtek component, allows a cybercriminal to remotely access the device and make it part of criminal networks or botnets.
According to Avast, a cybersecurity company, this set of devices can be used to send spam messages, distribute viruses or run cyber attacks to companies.
Realtek, the company involved in this failure, was informed last March about the seriousness of the finding, classified as high severityso you have time to develop a security patch that fixes this flaw before it’s publicly announced at DefCon.
However, the real importance of the announcement made at the conference is that the public knows not only the seriousness of the bug, but also the need to update the devices Realtek that they have in their homes or offices so that they avoid being affected by eventual cybercriminals.
The update that fixes this vulnerability It is already available to users, however it is important to confirm that the devices have downloaded and installed it.
In addition, the problem has regional dimensions due to the fact that there are a large number of routers that suffer from this failure, such as D-Link, Nexxt, Nisuta, Tenda and Zyxel.
These devices, in case of not installing the updatethey will not be protected against this security flaw and will be exposed to being manipulated remotely by cyber criminals.
Another option that can help protect the security of the router used at home or in the workplace is to perform a device change Well, since those that have been affected are in common use throughout the region, it is difficult to ensure that the current one does not have its security compromised.
Routers are the most unprotected
For its part, the cybersecurity company Kaspersky indicated that during 2021 they identified 87 vulnerabilities in routers or routers.
In addition, they indicated that a third of the device providers has not given any response in this regard and only 26% have given some kind of warning to their consumers, but without further delving into the problem.
Added to the situation, the study “Router security survey 2022” indicates that 73% of respondents have never thought of updating or installing security measures on your router, making it the device with the highest exposure to cyber threats.
In this regard, the antivirus company also ensures that consumers and small businesses do not have the necessary resources or knowledge to detect a threat in time before it has compromised the network and equipment.
According to an analysis carried out by the entity in cybersecuritysince 2010 threats through routers have been increasing, reaching its highest peak in 2020 with 603 possible registered cyberattacks.
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