81–90 of 122 posts
I must be missing something, but why are all these routers publicly listening on port 5431?
Ports 5431 and 1900 are used for UPnP. I can’t think of any good reason they should be listening on an external interface, but maybe the port scanning is happening on the inside.
I must be missing something, but why are all these routers publicly listening on port 5431?
Ports 5431 and 1900 are used for UPnP. I can’t think of any good reason they should be listening on an external interface, but maybe the port scanning is happening on the inside.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This will depend on what kind of Internet connection you have, or expect to have in the future. Gigabit internet connections are becoming more common here in the US, and some lower powered devices just can't route packets faster than say 100-200 Mbit/s. I can tell you what I did, which may or may not be helpful to you. I got Linksys WRT AC3200[0]. The "AC3200" bit refers to a type of wifi 802.11ac configuration that…
Would you happen to know if the 25% cheaper 'gaming edition' is as good? Doesn't seem to have MU-MIMO, which from what you've said might be an easy saving: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Linksys-WRT32X-UK-AC3200-Dual-Band-...
So, what is the most secured option for the moment? Buy a x86 box and turn it into a router? But it consumes more power than a low-power router, and buying more network adapter is not that cheap. I am currently using the open source tomato firmware. However, since there is a bug/feature in the router so that I cannot flash an image too large, or otherwise it would not work. Also, the configuration is limited to 32 KB…
If you want to go this route, used Intel NICs are cheap. I recently picked up a 4-port gigabit NIC (PCI-E) for £13.99. I'm running on a machine that would be on anyway, so the power usage is negligible.
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What if the router was being unused? What if the power usage was minimal? I think it is unethical not to utilize resources that are being wasted.
I hope your parents taught you to ask before invading somebody's personal property. Are you okay with XYZ Tech Company snooping on your private messages, emails, or credit card transactions? The impact that you'd see would be minimal (aside from more targeted ads, perhaps), and it's data which would otherwise be "wasted" if nobody was mining it.
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So the ERLite-3? https://www.ubnt.com/edgemax/edgerouter-lite/
the $48 ER-X is much faster than 99% of peoples' residential last mile broadband connections, it's good for up to about 750 Mbps of NAT and default route outbound to a gateway.
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Buy the Archer C7 version 2, and install the optimized version of openwrt: https://github.com/infinitnet/lede-ar71xx-optimized-archer-c... This build gets ~750 mbps NAT speed as opposed to vanilla openwrt, which is around ~300 mbps.
Is that v2 as in >v1, or is there a v3+ that I don't want? That is, can I just buy from Amazon [0] with a fairly safe assumption that a new C7 is OK? [0]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-Link-AC1750-Dualband-Zertifizier...
And it was flakey as f*ck. It rebooted itself roughly once a day, and would stop routing traffic to my fibre modem and need manually rebooted at least once a day.
The Openwrt support forums were... not helpful.
All this was such a shame, because the Openwrt feature set is so much capable than the stock firmware - I so wanted it to work, but had such a bad experience I haven't gone near it since and it will likely stay that way.
Is there any easy way to check if your router is vulnerable/compromised? Or instructions for disinfecting it as well as patching it? Like, based on actually being exploitable or compromised, not firmware versions or whatever. I actually suspect mine is compromised, it's been behaving funny for a month or two, needing to be restarted a lot. (Which, ironically, is a signal of a _buggy_ compromise, your router of course…
If I were you I'd check to see if your router can run one of the several open source firmware packages like OpenWRT, dd-wrt, or Tomato. In my personal experience the OpenWRT/lede team is on top of security issues, and the router web interface and tooling is completely fine. I'd be confident that flashing your device with modern open source firmware would solve the problem, but if you're paranoid just recycle the devi…
However, routers may be an exception. Apparently the industry has basically no business motivation to keep consumer-grade networking hardware secure, at all. Irrelevant to their profits or reputation.
I'll consider it. When I bought my router I intentionally got one that can run OpenWRT, but never ended up installing it, cause, who's got time for that? But perhaps there isn't really an alternative, unless you want a bot-net-ed router. Which honestly, and with shame, I'd just ignore the botnet sending out spam to other people if I didn't think it was compromising the functionality (and security) of my router for me. Last thing I wanna do is spend time becoming a network engineer after a day of getting paid to write software, but i guess that's where we're at.
(Oh crap, I just realized it could be my DSL modem instead of or in addition to my (wired and wifi) router. I know even LESS about that thing. I think none of these consumer products, owned by people who know a lot less than me, are ever gonna be protected, if even I am intimidated by trying to figure it out).
> Universal Plug-n-Play And, like so many other attempts to "simplify" supposedly complex configuration, in addition to being a massive security hole to attackers, it's almost useless to the home users for whom it was meant because it only works under a very narrow, mostly undocumented set of assumptions and if any of those assumptions are invalid, it fails silently.
I disabled it after this post, but it appears Plex switches to 'indirect' mode (it goes out to the Internet and back in) without it; i.e. I am using UPnP. It's not clear what the solution is - update firmware? I am on the latest. Use OpenWRT (or whatever it's called these days)? Every time I look into it (I really want to!) I stop at the simple 'I want to do this, I will happily buy a new router, which one do I buy a…