A Hacker Is Breaking Into People's Routers And Patching Them So They Can't Be Abused By Other Hackers

Authored by sunnyskyz.com and submitted by CT-Swooshy

A Hacker Is Breaking Into People's Routers And Patching Them So They Can't Be Abused By Other Hackers

A hacker is breaking into people's routers and making changes to their settings to prevent abuse by cyber-criminals.

The internet vigilante, who goes by "Alexey", claims to have disinfected over 100,000 MikroTik routers already. He boasts about his hobby on a Russian blogging platform.

"I added firewall rules that blocked access to the router from outside the local network," Alexey said. "In the comments, I wrote information about the vulnerability and left the address of the @router_os Telegram channel, where it was possible for them to ask questions."

Alexy says he's been only fixing MikroTik routers that have a vulnerability that came to light earlier this year. Security researcher Troy Mursch told ZDNet that over 420,000 MikroTik routers currently connected to the internet show signs they've been infected with cryptocurrency-mining scripts.

MikroTik has made the patches available online, but it's up to home users to make the updates.

In the meantime, Alexey is doing what he can to help others. But technically speaking, Alexey is on the wrong side of the law. Despite his good intentions, it is illegal to access another person's equipment without consent.

cferrios on July 27th, 2020 at 02:36 UTC »

Some people were upset that he did this. From this article:

"I added firewall rules that blocked access to the router from outside the local network," Alexey said. "In the comments, I wrote information about the vulnerability and left the address of the @router_os Telegram channel, where it was possible for them to ask questions."

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.

Popes1ckle on July 27th, 2020 at 02:12 UTC »

I remember when we first moved into our house and the Internet wasn’t hooked up yet. I went out on the front porch with my laptop and got on a neighbors WiFi, his whole network was wide open with file sharing. I could have looked at all of the turbo tax documents and everything. Instead I created a document on the desktop that said “read me”, which basically told them to secure their network, and that they should be thankful I’m a good guy, and then printed it to their printer just to be sure they saw it. I imagine I scared the shit out of someone, and I never told the neighbor it was me.

Fishing_For_Victory on July 27th, 2020 at 01:53 UTC »

Chaotic good