Hundreds of thousands of home and office routers have been compromised by Russian hackers and they might gather under information or could even bring down entire network traffic., the FBI warned on Friday.
Users of many brands of routers have been asked to switch off and then switch them on and then download all of the updates that the manufacturers are giving them to protect the routers, advised the U.S. law enforcement agency.
A website was allowed to be seized by the FBI by a court order on Wednesday that reportedly was planned to be used by the hackers to give instructions to the routers. The FBI warning came after that seizure. However, despite the fact that the seizure managed to prevent malicious communications, the routers still remained infected and the router related warning is aimed to clean-up the routers.
While the main target for further actions was probably Ukraine, the sleuths had detected infections in routers of more than 50 countries. Ukraine is the country that has faced many of the recent infections and a longtime cyberwarfare battleground.
A group called Sofacy that was related to the Russian government was the group with which the hackers were related, said the Justice Department while obtaining the court order.
A number of the most dramatic Russian hacks has been attributed to the Sofacy group, also known as APT28 and Fancy Bear. The group is also blamed for the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
Devices from Belkin International’s Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear Inc, TP-Link and QNAP were the target of the hacking campaign, Cisco Systems Inc said had said earlier.
Owners of the targeted and infected devices were bought from electronic stores or online, said an FBI official to the media.
Reports also said that routers given by internet service companies were also among those that could have been affected and the FBI is not ruling out that possibility.
The U.S. and Ukrainian governments were apprised of the investigations and the technical details by Cisco. Many companies in Ukraine have been the target of the Russian hackers in the past year or more as a result of the enmity between Russia and Ukraine which has resulted in damages of hundreds of millions of dollars in addition to at least two incidents of black outs.
Allegations that Russia was planning a cyber attack on state bodies in Ukraine as well as private companies just prior to the Champions League soccer final in Kiev on Saturday have been denied by Kremlin.
“The size and scope of the infrastructure by VPNFilter malware is significant,” the FBI said, adding that it is capable of rendering peoples’ routers “inoperable.”
Encryption and other tactics have made the malware hard to detect.
(Source:www.reuters.com)
Users of many brands of routers have been asked to switch off and then switch them on and then download all of the updates that the manufacturers are giving them to protect the routers, advised the U.S. law enforcement agency.
A website was allowed to be seized by the FBI by a court order on Wednesday that reportedly was planned to be used by the hackers to give instructions to the routers. The FBI warning came after that seizure. However, despite the fact that the seizure managed to prevent malicious communications, the routers still remained infected and the router related warning is aimed to clean-up the routers.
While the main target for further actions was probably Ukraine, the sleuths had detected infections in routers of more than 50 countries. Ukraine is the country that has faced many of the recent infections and a longtime cyberwarfare battleground.
A group called Sofacy that was related to the Russian government was the group with which the hackers were related, said the Justice Department while obtaining the court order.
A number of the most dramatic Russian hacks has been attributed to the Sofacy group, also known as APT28 and Fancy Bear. The group is also blamed for the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
Devices from Belkin International’s Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear Inc, TP-Link and QNAP were the target of the hacking campaign, Cisco Systems Inc said had said earlier.
Owners of the targeted and infected devices were bought from electronic stores or online, said an FBI official to the media.
Reports also said that routers given by internet service companies were also among those that could have been affected and the FBI is not ruling out that possibility.
The U.S. and Ukrainian governments were apprised of the investigations and the technical details by Cisco. Many companies in Ukraine have been the target of the Russian hackers in the past year or more as a result of the enmity between Russia and Ukraine which has resulted in damages of hundreds of millions of dollars in addition to at least two incidents of black outs.
Allegations that Russia was planning a cyber attack on state bodies in Ukraine as well as private companies just prior to the Champions League soccer final in Kiev on Saturday have been denied by Kremlin.
“The size and scope of the infrastructure by VPNFilter malware is significant,” the FBI said, adding that it is capable of rendering peoples’ routers “inoperable.”
Encryption and other tactics have made the malware hard to detect.
(Source:www.reuters.com)
