Inexpensive is not always Good

Apparently Walmart has been selling an affordable Jetstream router. Affordable, apparently, because it has a back door in it that would allow hackers to not only control the router, but also all of the computers on your network.

But Walmart is not alone.

Wavlink routers sold on Amazon also have back doors. In this case it attempts to connect to nearby WiFi connections so that it has a covert way to steal that data.

Similar routers are available on eBay.

Researchers say there is evidence that this is not a theoretical problem, but rather is being used in real attacks.

Also, these back doors are being used to allow your network to attack other networks via the Mirai bot network. Guess who the FBI is going to come visit if YOUR router is found to attacking other networks?

When the researchers talked to Walmart, to their credit, they said (a) it is currently out of stock and (b) they have no plans to replenish it. I will give them credit for dumping this trash even though they felt necessary to spin it. I guess they just couldn’t say “oh, crap, we got duped. Handled!”

Likely these two routers are really made by the same company.

The researchers apparently were bored during the pandemic, so they started buying cheap routers online to see if they could hack them.

The back doors even have a user friendly interface – a different one than the paying users see, of course.

These back doors, according to the researchers, are active and probably enabled on millions of devices. Credit: Cybernews

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