500K Home Routers Attacked

Last week, the news broke that the FBI, along with researchers at CISCO, have discovered a network of half a million routers that have been compromised by a group of Russian hackers known as “Fancy Bear.” The group has been using a malware program called “VPN Filter” to compromise home and small office routers.

This particularly nasty piece of malware has the capability of collecting communications, launching attacks and permanently destroying devices with a single command. VPNFilter has been uploaded on some routers from popuar brands like Linksys, Netgear, TP-Link and others, Cisco researchers said in an advisory.

To make matters worse, this is one of the few pieces of Internet-of-things malware that can survive a reboot. The good news is that FBI agents have seized a key server used in the attack. Here’s hoping the good guys can stop Fancy Bear in it’s tracks.