Monthly Archives: June 2018

  • Beyond Three Dumb Routers

    Posted on June 20, 2018 by pcwrt in Router, Security, Technology.

    To mitigate the risks of IoT devices on your home network, Steve Gibson, the creator of ShieldsUP!, proposed a “Three Dumb Router” configuration to isolate the insecure IoT devices from your normal LAN, where the more valuable and more secure devices such as PCs and NAS storage reside. Since the devices stay in their own […]

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  • How to get rid of VPNFilter malware (even though you don’t know if your router is infected)

    Posted on June 6, 2018 by pcwrt in Router, Security, Technology.

    Ars Technica reported today that the VPNFilter malware targets a much larger number of devices than previously thought (200,000 additional routers were added to the initial estimate of 500,000). And it is more powerful than revealed in original analysis. VPNFilter’s elaborate design involves three stages. Stage 1 acts as a backdoor that uses a sophisticated […]

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  • Can Alexa be used to spy?

    Posted on June 5, 2018 by pcwrt in Security, Technology.

    On May 24, 2018, Portland, Oregon local TV station Kiro 7 reported that an Amazon Alexa device recorded a private conversation, then sent it out to a random contact. Amazon confirmed the incident, and attributed it to an “unlikely” string of events that caused Alexa to mistakingly interpret background sounds as commands. In other words, […]

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  • Put IoT devices on guest network

    Posted on June 3, 2018 by pcwrt in Security, Technology.

    IoT devices are known to be vulnerable to cyber attacks. The best known instance of such an attack is probably the Mirai botnet. The botnet infected numerous IoT devices (such as home routers and IP security cameras) and used them to perform a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. It brought down major web sites […]

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