Hacking an ADSL router is this easy
Majority of
Internet users use average home ADSL router for broadband connection.
Despite being the gatekeepers to your network, these ADSL routers can be
easily hacked. This is because ADSL routers are low-cost consumer
devices manufactured on the assembly lines somewhere in China without
much of security investment or security patches or updates.
SensePost
CTO Dominic White says that the home ADSL routers can be hacked in many
ways due to this fact. He demonstrated this by running a “drive-by
attack” on a router running DD-WRT third-party firmware. Similar attacks
are possible against other router software, while several other types
of attacks against home ADSL routers can also be executed.
“There
was a competition at Defcon last year [2014] called SOHOpelessly Broken,
focusing on attacks on these things,” said White.
White said that
some of these routers may require physical access to the device, or
that the attacker is connected to the same local network as the
router. White demonstrated a type of attack that a hacker could use that
doesn’t require either of those connections – a cross-site request
forgery (CSRF).
This attack exploits the fact that users might log
into their router to check or change something and then not log out.
Some router firmware doesn’t even offer the option to log out. Once the
ADSL router has been hacked a cyber criminal may set up an attack
website, or have the HTML needed to execute the attack delivered over an
advertising network that may not scrutinise the content of the ads it
serves.
In this way, an attacker could change the username and
password of routers that don’t have protection against CSRF attacks. If
login to the router was previously restricted to the local network, an
attacker could also make it accessible from the Internet.