Home Broadband Security Concern

Home Broadband security is becoming a major issue this days as most of them are implemented by users with little or no security knowledge.

As a security consultant, my intention is not to scare you but to make you aware of what is going on. I am very concerned about how easy it has become for hackers to break into people's private home broadband networks and steal their data without them even knowing about it. The problem is that the service providers, in 90% of the cases simply send the customer a wireless broadband router access point with default username and password, this is the same details that is sent to all their customers. The reason that the ISPs do this is that, it makes it easy for them to get into your router if they need to make changes or troubleshoot your broadband connection at a later date. The downside to this is that if you do not change the default username and password, anyone with some knowledge of how to use "WHOIS IP" can get into your network without you knowing about it.

Hackers are now finding it too easy to steal data from people on a daily basis. There are several techniques used by hackers to steal information, so - the harder you make it to get into your private network the better, "in most case".

The hacking world keeps the techniques that I will be detailing in my blogs a big secret, but I will show you some of this techniques so that you can at least protect yourself, do make sure you read all my upcoming blogs about this issue.

The process of stealing user information involves several steps - An hacker may start by driving to a random area and checking for the number of available access point in the area broadcasting their SSID, once the hacker determines that it is worth his or her while then the process of capturing the data begins. In most case people leave the default name for their access point device unchanged e.g sky123 or virgin321, this tells the hackers that you have not implemented proper security on your network. By knowing who your service provider is, they can attempt to get into you network by checking the default username and password used by your service provider. If you have already changed the default password the hacker may simply decide to move on to the next victim if you are not a prime target. If you are a prime target, the hacker will continue to interrogate your network by either running password cracking or brute force against your access point. As you may know already the username on most access point cannot be changed so all that is required to get into your network is the admin password for your access point.

We all know how important it is to keep our private information private.

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