Following reports that a type of malware has infected more than 500,000 routers used in homes and small businesses in more than 50 countries, the FBI is urging all consumers to reboot their routers. The VPNFilter malware was discovered by Cisco’s security researchers and affects routers made by Linksys, Mikrotik, Netgear, QNAP, and TP-Link. The U.S. Department of Justice said the authors of the VPNFilter were part of the Sofacy group that answered directly to the Russian government, Reuters reported, and that Ukraine was the likely target of the attack.
“The VPNFilter malware is a multistage, modular platform with versatile capabilities to support both intelligence collection and destructive cyberattack operations,” Cisco said in a report. Because the malware could collect data from the user and even perform a large -scale destructive attack, Cisco recommends that owners of SOHO or network attached storage (NAS) devices be especially cautious with this type of attack. And since it’s unclear how compromised devices were infected in the first place, officials are urging users of all routers and NAS devices, not just the 14 devices identified by Cisco, to reboot.
Read full story here: FBI Urges Everyone To Reboot All Routers Immediately | Digital Trends
