Home and office routers come under attack by China state hackers, France warns ... On Wednesday, France’s National Agency for Information Systems Security—abbreviated as ANSSI—warned national businesses and organizations that the group was behind a massive attack campaign that was using hacked routers prior to carrying out reconnaissance and attacks as a means to cover up the intrusions. “ANSSI is currently handling a large intrusion campaign impacting numerous French entities,” an ANSSI advisory warned. “Attacks are still ongoing and are led by an intrusion set publicly referred to as APT31. It appears from our investigations that the threat actor uses a network of compromised home routers as operational relay boxes in order to perform stealth reconnaissance as well as attacks.” The advisory contains indicators of compromise that organizations can use to determine if they were hacked or targeted in the campaign. The indicators include 161 IP addresses, although it’s not entirely clear if they belong to compromised routers or other types of Internet-connected devices used in the attacks ... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...r-attack-by-china-state-hackers-france-warns/ Unfortunately, some router manufacturers will ship these things with default passwords that are not randomized, so it is important as a user to check and make sure that your hardware is secure. That typically means logging into the router from a PC or even a mobile device and changing that password. Make sure it is long, not a simple dictionary word, and preferably complex enough that it can't be guessed or brute-forced. Also be aware that the password in question is NOT the same as your wireless access key, which is often randomized by default and thus probably does not need to be changed. In fact, you could probably safely set your router password to be the same as that and it would be pretty secure. This is for the "admin" account on the router, the router's version of the Windows Administrator or UNIX/Linux root account, since routers are essentially little computers with a bunch of network interfaces and a special operating system.
I bet you the people that need this information aren't able to get to this site to read that post. The rest of us do that kind of thing regularly. Why is everybody so nosy, anyway? What are they looking to find on some random American's computer?
