Most home office users need to simply power cycle their routers and disable remote access; enterprises with work-at-home employees should move NAS behind the firewall.
News of how the Russians are alleged to have infected more than 500,000 home routers worldwide via the VPNFilter malware broke
last week, leaving home users and security managers scratching their heads about how to best to lock themselves down.
Craig Williams, director of Talos outreach, a leading member of the Cisco Talos research team that discovered the malware, says most SOHO users simply need to reboot their routers and do a firmware upgrade.
“The good news based on our research is that VPNFilter used common hacking techniques on common vulnerabilities,” Williams says. “This was not a zero-day attack.
According to a recent Symantec blog post, VPNFilter is a three-stage malware.
Stage 1 gets installed first and is used to maintain a persistent presence on the infected device; it will contact a command and control server to download further modules.
Stage 2 contains the main payload and does file collection, command execution, data exfiltration and device management. It also has a destructive capability and can effectively "brick" the device if it receives a command from the attackers. It does this by overwriting a section of the device’s firmware and rebooting, rendering it unusable.
...
....
...