Gadgetory

hey everyone welcome to the inside scoop I'm scene that's karna tsuboi joined by senior writer Seth Rosenblatt hi now Seth a recent report came out saying that 13 of the most popular routers that we all use at home are now known as easily hackable tell us about this study so the research firm independent security evaluators out of Maryland put out this study where they looked at the most popular routers available or some of them and they determined that using very common to semi common security hacks they were able to infiltrate the routers and that could be very serious absolutely serious because when you're at home you think you're safe mhm and therefore doing your banking and your shopping and absolutely the information the other issue isn't just for home use that it's that a lot of these routers are used by small businesses obviously a lot of credit card information going out over those two absolutely so the other part of this study that was a little disconcerting basically said that there's nothing that we can do about this or very little late there is very little that we can do the study put a lot of the onus on the router makers the router vendors saying that they really have to start paying attention to security and if they don't they're leaving their customers which basically means all of us out on a limb but at the same time there's not a lot of incentive for these router makers to update their technology that quickly right absolutely one of the big problems is that even when the router vendors do the right thing and they put out a firmware update there's no automatic firmware update process so you still have to go to their website download the firmware installed on the router yourself and one thing that independent security evaluate errs road was that they think that that the router vendors should make this an automatic update process hmm well it seems like the other part of the problems that these routers are typically very cheap mm-hmm and they last for a long time and Security's not necessarily a selling feature absolutely and it would cost them a lot more money to invest in security and to invest in the kind of features like Windows has or OSX for mac has where it's automatically updating I'm sure we've given these tips a million times but about some very basic tips of what you can do to browse a flea browsing safely is when we're talking about router hacking there's not much that you can do because your internet signal is being intercepted at the beginning but things you can do or use two different browsers for your financial and mission-critical browsing such as emails going to your banking site and use a second browser for casual browsing I prefer using Chrome and Firefox but there's a lot of good browsers out there and what about changing your network name and password as frequently as you can okay changing network name and password is a good idea it's a very good idea if you can on your router to change your admin password as well if you can use a password that has spaces in it do that that's more secure than using one long word that has multiple characters in it and and you know unusual characters also some routers let you change the username from admin to something else if you can do that that's also recommended yeah just extra steps for the hacker staff to get through absolutely thank you so much SEC writer Seth Rosenblatt I'm Kara Tsuboi thanks for watching the inside scoop