The FBI issued a warning on Friday claiming that Russian computer criminals had compromised hundreds of thousands of office and home routers and could shut down network traffics or collect user information.
The U.S law enforcement agency has urged the owners of many routers to turn the servers off and on again and to also download updates from the manufacturer in order to protect themselves.
The FBI stated in a Facebook post saying:
“The FBI recommends any owner of small office and home office routers power cycle (reboot) the devices. Foreign cyber actors have compromised hundreds of thousands of home and office routers and other networked devices worldwide by using VPNFilter malware to target small office and home office routers. The malware is able to perform multiple functions, including possible information collection, device exploitation, and blocking network traffic.”
The warning has come about since a court order gave the FBI authorisation to seize any website that the hackers could have used as part of a botnet.
After obtain the court order the Justice Department claimed the hackers involved in this attack were associated with a group named Sofacy, who are affiliated with the Russian government.
Sofacy have also been known to be called APT28 and Fancy Bear who were accused for a number of the more severe Russian cyber attacks, one of which being the Democratic National Committee which occurred in the 2016 U.S presidential promotions.
This was previously reported on by us earlier this week whereby, Cisco Systems Inc. said the hacking campaign targeted devices from Netgear, Linksys, QNAP, TP-Link, and MikroTik.
AnFBI official stated that the kinds of devices targeted by the hackers were obtained by users at online stores. The FBI added, “The size and scope of the infrastructure by VPNFilter malware is significant” also claiming that this might make their routers “inoperable.”