Tuesday Tech Tip: Check if Your Home Router is Vulnerable

The folks over at WordFence, a popular WordPress security plugin, have developed a great tool to see if your home router is currently vulnerable to the “misfortune cookie.” Here’s some of the details of the issue: 

Half of the internet service providers we analyzed have routers with a very specific vulnerability. This vulnerability is known as the “misfortune cookie”. We will call it the MC vulnerability for short. It has been known for a few years and was first disclosed by CheckPoint in 2014. It is now being used to hack home routers. Using the tool below you can tell if you have the MC vulnerability.

The MC vulnerability exists in a service that your ISP uses to remotely manage your home router. That service listens on a “port” number, which is 7547. Besides the MC vulnerability, this port can have other vulnerabilities, one of which was disclosed a few months ago. Researchers have been discussing the dangers of port 7547 in home routers for a few years now.

Your ISP should not allow someone from the public internet to connect to your router’s port 7547. Only your ISP should be able to access this port to manage your home router. They have the ability to configure their network to prevent outsiders from accessing that port. Many ISPs do not block public access to port 7547.

To get the full details and to test your router to see if you have the probelm, head on over to the WordFence blog.

Image: Wikipedia