LAS VEGAS—During his keynote and a press conference that followed here at the Black Hat information security conference, In-Q-Tel Chief Information Security Officer Dan Geer expressed concern about the growing threat of botnets powered by home and small office routers. The inexpensive Wi-Fi routers commonly used for home Internet access—which are rarely patched by their owners—are an easy target for hackers, Geer said, and could be used to construct a botnet that "could probably take down the Internet." Asked by Ars if he considered home routers to be the equivalent of critical infrastructure as a security priority, he answered in the affirmative.
Geer spoke about the threat posed by home routers in advance of "SOHOpelessly Broken," a router hacking contest scheduled for the DEF CON security conference later this week sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Because they are so cheap, you can get a low-end router for less than 20 bucks that hasn't been updated in a while," Geer explained.
Attackers could identify vulnerabilities in particular models and then scan the Internet for targets based on the routers' signatures. "They can then build botnets on the exterior of the network—the routing that it does is only on side facing ISPs," he said. "If I can build a botnet on the outside of the routers, I could probably take down the Internet."
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