Cisco responds to Black Hat's Million Router Hacker

Company posts ways to prevent DNS rebinding attack on Linksys routers

Cisco has posted a blog entry in response to the talk being delivered this week at Black Hat on hacking millions of consumer routers. We blogged on this talk two weeks ago. 

Basically, the presenter claims that a DNS rebinding technique can be used by an attacker to infiltrate the router and take control of a user's Web browser to invade internal files and applications. The technique makes Cisco Linksys WRT routers vulnerable, as well as those from ActionTec, Asus, Belkin, Dell and Thompson. 

But Cisco, in this week's blog post, claims users can protect themselves from the hack by changing some of the default settings on their Linksys WRT router:

We've tried to reach the researcher for a chat, but based on existing information doing any of these following steps on your Linksys WRT model router will help provide security:

• 1. Change the Default Router Password
• 2. Change your SSID (also known as Network Name)
• 3. Enable WPA2 encryption
• 4. Upgrade to the latest Linksys firmware

WRT models ship with default settings that are known to anyone who uses the same router, Cisco says in the post. So changing the default password and SSID will help prevent the DNS rebinding attack.

Linksys E-Series and the new Valet home routers are not susceptible to the DNS rebinding vulnerability because software on these models establish new SSIDs and passwords automatically during initial setup. Cisco says.

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• Linksys wireless routers