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A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers

zdnet.com

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Re: A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers

#3

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

>But despite adjusting firewall settings for over 100,000 users, Alexey says that only 50 users reached out via Telegram. A few said "thanks," but most were outraged.

Have to wonder if those "outraged" users are ones who would have proactively fixed it themselves, or if they would've let their router happily continue to chug away as part of a botnet.

Re: A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers

#4

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

ccnafr wrote: post #2

The very last paragraph kinda makes me feel bad for MikroTik, but I'd like them to add an auto-update feature to their routers. Probably fix all these issues.

An "automatic" update that would potentially cause the router to reboot and bring down the network would go over very poorly with customers, even if it happens at 3 AM.

A better solution would be automatically checking for updates, and then sending an e-mail notification to the address associated with the router's owner/sys admin.

I "registered" my router and email address with Netgear about a year ago and I was shocked a few months ago when they actually sent me an e-mail to let me know that a new firmware update was available for my router.

Re: A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers

#6

Post by duxup »

ccnafr wrote: post #2

The very last paragraph kinda makes me feel bad for MikroTik, but I'd like them to add an auto-update feature to their routers. Probably fix all these issues.

If they thought their consumer users would just go out of their way to update their routers .... that's just not understanding how humans work.

Re: A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers

#7

Post by booleandilemma »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #3

>But despite adjusting firewall settings for over 100,000 users, Alexey says that only 50 users reached out via Telegram. A few said "thanks," but most were outraged. Have to wonder if those "outraged" users are ones who would have proactively fixed it themselves, or if they would've let their router happily continue to chug away as part of a botnet.

...he’s the grey-hat they deserve, but not the one they need right now...

Re: A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers

#8

Post by Klathmon »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #4
ccnafr wrote: post #2

The very last paragraph kinda makes me feel bad for MikroTik, but I'd like them to add an auto-update feature to their routers. Probably fix all these issues.

An "automatic" update that would potentially cause the router to reboot and bring down the network would go over very poorly with customers, even if it happens at 3 AM. A better solution would be automatically checking for updates, and then sending an e-mail notification to the address associated with the router's owner/sys admin. I "registered" my router and email address with Netgear about a year ago and I was shoc…

I don't think automatic updates would be as disruptive as you think.

And having the ability to disable them and apply updates manually, combined with some forewarning like you are talking about (an email that says your router will restart tomorrow at 3am unless you do it sooner), would go a really long way.

Re: A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers

#10

Post by philamonster »

Devices at vulnerable routerOS version and not already compromised would not be vulnerable if the firewall was enabled. It's that simple. Not great that these boxes used to ship in this default state and I can _understand_ a home user unfamiliar with what they're dealing with but what reason is there for deploying infrastructure this way at an ISP or hospital or whatever org?
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