Security News Meet the 'average paperclip threat': Why Airbnb rentals are the next big attack surface

[frogboy]

As it turns out, the paperclip can be mightier than the sword -- it just depends how you use it.

Ten years ago, there were alarm bells over public Wi-Fi in coffee shops, and then it was hotel Wi-Fi. But today, one security researcher says that the short-term house rental market is so big that now it's the Wi-Fi network in the home you share that has become the target.

Jeremy Galloway, a security researcher, says that the housing market, which between Airbnb and HomeAway alone accounts for more than three million homes, is a "huge attack surface that can't be ignored any longer."

Galloway told me on the phone ahead of his talk at Black Hat on Thursday that attackers will "always go after the weakest point," which in any network is usually the router. It's no secret that routers are woefully insecure. Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the internet, who along with other experts has long championed a massive overhaul in router security, arguing that router makers are letting a key part of the internet's infrastructure "rot in place."

Full Article. Meet the 'average paperclip threat': Why Airbnb rentals are the next big attack surface | ZDNet

 

[DardiM]

Thanks for the share

"Physically removing access to the router is a major mitigation that will stop most opportunist network hackers in their tracks".
My security tool against a possibly physical access to my router :
=> a baseball bat (it's normal, as a bat-penguin)