FTC Forces Asus To Improve Router Security (helpnetsecurity.com) 74
An anonymous reader writes: The FTC is actively trying to make sure that companies secure the software and devices that they provide to consumers, and a settlement with Taiwan-based hardware maker ASUSTeK Computer is one step towards that goal. The complaint was raised after well-meaning hackers exploited a weakness on Asus routers and left note on victims' drives notifying them of the matter. Later, a researcher discovered an exploit campaign that abused vulnerabilities to change vulnerable routers' DNS servers. According to the settlement, the company will have to establish and maintain a comprehensive security program subject to independent audits for the next 20 years.
That's NOT a bug! (Score:2)
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More like: "If it doesn't have a back door for us to check it, then it is not secure".
Re:Overreach much? (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't want caveat emptor for this shit, we want companies who are accountable for the security of the products they make.
Do you want to live in a world where security boils down to "too bad, suckers"?
This bullshit of caveat emptor is why we have such shit security on the web in the first place.
More companies need to get their knuckles rapped and have penalties when they do an incompetent job at securing such stuff.
Re:Overreach much? (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, is Microsoft next?
I was about to post the exact same thing. I'm glad the foreign company was censured for its bad security practices, but when does our home-grown American company get the same?
Re:Overreach much? (Score:4, Informative)
OK, is Microsoft next?
I was about to post the exact same thing. I'm glad the foreign company was censured for its bad security practices, but when does our home-grown American company get the same?
This hasn't been true of MS for some time. They are actually pretty good now.
This post is about to be modded to oblivion as a troll, but I'll say it anyway. Last year OSX and iOS each had more security vulnerabilities than any Microsoft product. They had more vulnerabilities than FLASH.
(Yes, on /. a factual statement is a troll if it casts Apple in a bad light)
Re:Overreach much? (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft actively patches their software. Perhaps we should look at penalties for the glibc devs though.
You are tragically misinformed. glibc has been patched. On the other hand, MS has decided not to support Windows Vista in its totality up to its contractual EOL date.
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Re:Overreach much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Things like computer security? I don't expect that the government is necessarily going to be the one testing everything, but I'm perfectly happy with the government instituting penalties for companies that sell a supposedly "secure" product that turns out to be complete bullsh*t full of more holes than swiss cheese, because penalties are pretty much the only thing that's going to really get companies to take things seriously, at least in the SOHO market.
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We don't want caveat emptor for this shit, we want companies who are accountable for the security of the products they make.
Do you want to live in a world where security boils down to "too bad, suckers"?
This bullshit of caveat emptor is why we have such shit security on the web in the first place.
More companies need to get their knuckles rapped and have penalties when they do an incompetent job at securing such stuff.
OK, if "Caveat Emptor" is an unacceptable solution for routers, what about phones? Verizon is notoriously slow at getting modern updates to its customers. Operating systems? Other IOT devices like lightbulbs and their respective controllers? Other software that's not completely self-contained/network unaware?
Are we going to lease hardware from everyone just to make sure we're all secure, so that the manufacturer will patch it for us, at least until they want to sell a newer model?
If we aren't going
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We don't want caveat emptor for this shit, we want companies who are accountable for the security of the products they make.
Do you want to live in a world where security boils down to "too bad, suckers"?
Sounds like North America. Coming from the UK to North America is a bit of a shock from a consumer protection point of view. In the UK a product must be, among other things, fit for the specific purpose it was bought for. So if I go to a shop and pick up some widget and ask the shop person "Can I use this widget for this specific job (explaining the purpose)?" and he says "Yes." and I buy it and find that it doesn't work for that specific job then I get to go back and get a refund. No bullshitting me with "
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You just described how the statute of fraud works, even in the US: Burroughs got sued for shipping machines so unspeakably bad they were "not suitable for the purpose sold", and lost. See http://www.nytimes.com/1981/10... [nytimes.com]
I think the UK version is actually stronger; it doesn't have to just be fit for the purpose that it was made for. If the customer specifies a novel use case in the shop and the shop says it can fulfil that specific use case and it can't thats a refund.
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US law doesn't apply to the whole world but I don't see hardware vendors behaving any better in the rest of the world.
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While we are at it, lets make seatbelts and airbags manufacturer optional as well. Oh and no oversight of drug and vaccine manufacturer.
Lead paint and toxic chemicals in your kids toys? Caveat emptor mother fucker, you should have known. Go check all the factories for all the parts in their toys and make an informed decision.
Oh, the chemical waste dump in your backyard? Caveat emptor again.. you should never have invited that co
Re:Overreach much? (Score:5, Interesting)
Caveat Emptor is limited by sanity in areas where the state of the art is well beyond what you could reasonably expect the average consumer to know or be able to appraise for themselves.
Car analogy: It's unlikely that most readers could look at a vehicle they desire to purchase and determine whether its brakes work properly or are likely to fail under normal driving conditions, whether its airbag might be badly designed and not deploy (or deploy at inappropriate times), etc. So we trust government regulators to establish certain minimal safety standards and enforce car manufacturers' compliance with them.
Many readers here might be able to evaluate a router we have in our hands for obvious security issues. Few of our parents or grand parents could do so. Likewise, none of us could evaluate such things before purchase for a device we've never powered on. Given the importance and ubiquity of consumer network routers, it seems reasonable to hold manufacturers to a higher standard than, "Oops... Sorry we left your entire home network open to the Internet and anyone driving by. Here's a patch (maybe)."
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I guess Caveat Emptor is now being taken care of by mother government...
In historical times, a dishonest merchant would be put to death. No one likes lying liars, they had better beware of us. Else, uh, "Death of a Salesman".
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Did anyone else read the headline as:
FTC Forces Anus To Improve Router Security
?
"FTC has hand in Asus plugging hole in exploited router firmware." Better?
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"FTC plugs Asus's Massive Hole"
Insert Goatse link here...
sadly, Asus is one of the better ones (Score:5, Interesting)
I've generally preferred Asus routers to its peers for quite some time. They've been great with providing firmware updates four years after release (d-link, I'm looking at you), doing simultaneous dual-band as advertised (netgear, I'm looking at you), their firmware is responsive and generally very stable (Belkin, I'm looking at you). Their mid-range units support multi-wan and make excellent print servers, and they've been very supportive of the modding community - most of their gear supports merlin, padavan, ddwrt, openwrt, and tomato, and their recovery mode is near-brickproof.
Yes, it's obnoxious that they had security issues, and yes, I replaced my N56U with a linksys ea6900 (and regretted until tomato was installed), but they're definitely better than most in my experience.
More to the topic, I wonder if this will yield some case precedent for these requirements industry wide. I can dream...
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Re: sadly, Asus is one of the better ones (Score:2)
Good call. I just checked their site, and you're right - it's been nearly a year since their last update, which is strange because they still sell them new, and before that, updates were released several times a year. I'm still going with "better than most" because my linksys required a bootloader flash to get third party firmware working, especially notable because the ea6900 has a well documented bootloader issue that the patch fixed.
I'm genuinely curious if any other router OEMs have a better track recor
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SERIOUSLY? Amazing. Your low standards, that is. Have a look at Mikrotik - not for someone not knowing what they do, but THEY do updates for TONS of years, are cheap and provide serious enterprise grade features. From a super cheap 40 USD router to a 36 core backbone router.
"...researchers at the Fujitsu Security Operations Center in Warrington, UK began tracking Upatre being served from hundreds of compromised home routers – particularly routers powered by MikroTik..."
Speaking of low standards, were you trying to provide a good alternate solution with your comments here, or were you trying to help identify yet another company that should be awaiting 20 years worth of security audits? Just curious...
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SERIOUSLY? Amazing. Your low standards, that is.
Have a look at Mikrotik - not for someone not knowing what they do, but THEY do updates for TONS of years, are cheap and provide serious enterprise grade features. From a super cheap 40 USD router to a 36 core backbone router.
I'm not sure where this idea that "frequent updates means better" came from, but it's a bunch of crap. I'd rather have firmware that only needed an update on rare occasions, than one which is so crappily made that there's a new patch coming out every week. The frequency of updates is not a good metric to measure the firmware stability or security on. Rather, it should be measured on how often problems crop up and how quickly they are patched, and how many of the updates are actually adding features as oppos
Schizophrenia Government Regulations (Score:3)
Apple, you have TOO MUCH security!
ASUS, you have TOO LITTLE security!
Make up you're friggin' mind Uncle Sam... Security is either good for everyone, or bad.
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Apple's security keeps the government from meddling with your data.
ASUS' lack of security allows you to replace their shot firmware with one that keeps government from meddling with your data.
Makes sense now?
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Apple, you have TOO MUCH security!
Close. That order is being challenged and is probably not lawful. See the other discussions and legal analysis for details. Think in terms of stick and carrot. Generally the government can offer a carrot, can remove carrots offered elsewhere, can tie one carrot to another, but it takes some severe problems before they bring in a stick. For defects problems, the stick is usually recalls.
If the government treated too much security as a defect or violating some law, the government could probably find a way t
Forget any router that... (Score:2)
Doesn't have a third party firmware option available. End of Rant..
Personally, I use a couple of Linksys offerings that have excellent OpenWRT support. I have a fleet of WRT4300's and a 1900ac that actually come with a variant of OpenWRT and are well supported. They all have Layer 2 capable switch hardware (so you can do VLAN stuff) which is nice. The WRT4300's are about $40 used on E-,Bay and the 1900AC retail at about $135 new and $120 used. Running OpenWRT gives you a lot of capability.
Mis-marketing is bad (Score:1)
Leaving routers wide-open to attack AND MARKETING THEM AS SUCH is not.
If Asus had marketed these as "here's a router, here's how you can hack it, here's how to plug the holes, and please don't do anything stupid like put it on a public network without fixing the holes and changing the passwords first"
and sold it to hobbyists rather than regular consumers, then there wouldn't (or rather, shouldn't) be any reason to drag the FTC into the matter.
Huh? Ok, where's the catch? (Score:2)
The FTC, of all the entities that could possibly muscle in on this matter, wants a company to do something to increase consumer safety?
Ok, what does the story not tell? Are they going to demand that the routers be locked down to the point where the customer has no way of replacing the crappy firmware with something usable?
The FCC prevents users from securing their routers (Score:5, Informative)
All the while the FCC and the EU are working on preventing users from protecting themselves by modifying the routers firmware:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
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Only to prevent transmitting outside of the appropriate bands.
That's all the FCC cares about, and they want protections put in place to prevent a user from using say, channel 14 in North America.
Now, until now, most manufacturers simply used location specific firmware to lock down the transmit channels, but the next generation set will probably incorporate protections stored elsewher
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The good part is this is a proposed rule-making, and the FCC doesn't actually want to mess up Vint Cerf and Dave Taht. IMHO it was a bug in their spec (;-))
The bad part is that several vendors think that locking down the entire router is a good and cheap idea, and that no-one like the FTC will object.
The good part is that the FTC does exist, after all, and there is now a growing community of people with locked-down routers that contain a compliance-critical bug, on that takes the router right out of com
I just bought an Asus router. (Score:2)
DD-WRT (Score:2)
Just flash these routers with DD-WRT. I found an old router that I got for free some time ago from SamKnows (an European company doing broadband performance measurement). When the campaign was finished, the thing was just lying in a cupboard. Got it revived with DD-WRT and it works fine now. Great stuff!
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I use OpenWRT myself on a fleet of Linksys and Netgear offerings... I'm with you though, I only use hardware for which there is third party open source firmware available.
oi Asus (Score:1)