Study Says Home Routers Vulnerable to Attacks

Again, the phylosophy of "no system is perfect" is proved, including routers used for home and small office. Router is a basic knowledge and device on networking. When it is compromised, it is dangerous for users using the netwoks. They would become victims of hacker's attack although their machine is already protected by the latest patch. I just imagine if it happens at a small network of government, it could cause a leakage of data which could be confidential.

From The SANS Institute:
--Study Says Home Routers Vulnerable to Attacks (April 17 & 18, 2013) Many widely used home routers are easy to hack into, according to a study by a company called Independent Security Evaluators. A test found 13 of the most popular home routers had easily remotely exploitable vulnerabilities that could be used to snoop on or modify network traffic. All of the routers tested were using the most recent firmware and were tested with their out-of-the box default configurations.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57579981-83/top-wi-fi-routers-easy-to-hack-says-study/
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9238474/Popular_home_routers_contain_critical_ security_vulnerabilities?taxonomyId=17

Those products were the Linksys WRT310v2, Netgear's WNDR4700, TP-Link's WR1043N, Verizon's FiOS Actiontec MI424WR-GEN3I, D-Link's DIR865L and Belkin's N300, N900 and F5D8236-4 v2 models.
Compromised routers are valuable to hackers, since they can intercept the traffic of anyone on that network. If the traffic is unencrypted, it can be viewed.
Man-in-the-middle attacks can let a hacker launch more sophisticated attacks on all users in the router's domain, ISE said. Hackers can perform attacks such as sniffing and rerouting non-SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) traffic, tampering with DNS (Domain Name System) settings and conducting distributed denial-of-service attacks.
The consultancy divided the attacks into those which required an attacker to be on the same network and those on networks that could be attacked remotely. Two routers from Belkin, the N300 and N900, were vulnerable to a remote attack that did not require the hacker to have authentication credentials.
All of the named products were vulnerable to an authenticated attack if the hacker was on the same network and had login credentials or access to a victim who had an active session on the particular network.