10,000 routers hacked and have become more secure | Wifi-Hacking |

In a surprising and unprecedented incident, 10,000 home based routers have been hacked and in a surprising turn of events, these routers have become more secure. It seems that the malware has been implemented by a White Hat hacker who intends to identify vulnerability in the routers and prompt the users to address the security related issues and change their passwords. According to Symantec, the application cleans the routers of any suspicious malware and then asks the users to change their password to something more complicated.

Malware is a term that is generally has a negative connotation and hence a malware capable of improving security of a system is something unheard of. The name of the application is Wifatch software and gets installed on Linux operating system based routers. It works through a peer to peer network and when it detects a Telnet port which is vulnerable, the application shuts down the port. Telnet ports generally have easy to crack passwords and are therefore highly vulnerable to attacks.

Wifatch updates the firmware of the routers and asks the users for changing the passwords. It also has a module for detecting common malwares and therefore efficiently identifies them and eliminate them. The application is highly effective against DDoS or distributed denial of service attacks carried out by other malwares.

A signature included in the email belongs to Richard Stallman, a supporter of free software. It does seem that the authors of the code intentionally did not hide it so that everyone can look at the code. Mario Ballano, a Symantec researcher has however stated that although Wifatch has good intentions, the methods used by it is similar to that of a malware and therefore they will consider the application as a malware although unlike other malwares, it does not breach the security but enhances it.