D-Link is in the process of developing a patch for a serious security vulnerability in some of its older routers that essentially functions as a backdoor. The bug, discovered by a security researcher and publicized over the weekend, enables a remote user to log into an affected router as an administrator and take whatever actions he pleases.
Why the backdoor is present in the routers is a major question. Hardware manufacturers in the past, when confronted with similar questions, have said that they sometimes include such functionality for remote support or as a debugging mechanism during the development process and then mistakenly forgot to remove it. Heffner said that another researcher, Travis Goodspeed, suggested a possible reason for the presence of the D-Link backdoor.
