Does your home network need a gate guard?
Photo of Coast Guard Air Station, San Diego, 2013
Photo by Visitor7, used under CCA-SA
The next few weeks are going to be busy ones around here, so expect a few roundup articles in lieu of the usual. Today, I want to point out some security related articles you should be aware of, as knowing is half the battle.
Last week, Malwarebytes Unpacked posted “Large malvertising campaign under way involving DoubleClick and Zedo“. This is troubling because of the size of these advertising networks. You cannot look through your cookies and not find DoubleClick somewhere in there unless you have them blocked.
MVPS has an article on “Blocking Unwanted Connections with a Hosts File“, which can protect you against this by blocking the known advertising sites. Be aware, though, that it won’t block the unknown sites, and it might alter the appearance and/or functionality of sites by using it.
It looks like the rollout of new top-level domains is going well, but some crooks are taking advantage of the new and unfamiliar (which is SOP for crooks, always looking to confuse) by exploiting these new domains to redirect people to infected websites. According to Malwarebytes Unpacked article “Malicious activity observed in new Top-level domains“:
Out of curiosity, we checked our honeypot logs for the past 60 days to see if any malicious activity came from these new TLDs. Here are some of our findings:
… [check original article for data]…
It is important to note that the majority of the domains involved were not registered by the bad guys themselves. Instead what we observed are websites whose DNS entries have been hacked and are used for nefarious purposes.
This sort of begs the question: Just how vulnerable is the entire DNS system? DNS attacks are nothing new, but if it is this easily hacked, then perhaps it is time to come up with something better.
With all of this bad news, perhaps you think you need a gate guard at your modem or router’s doorway. Commercial routers by default have some advanced functionality that can take care of bad situations, but consumer grade routers fall well short of this type of security. It’s a balance between security and complexity, for sure, but with all sorts of malware and other types of attacks on the rise, including routers getting hacked, perhaps it really is time for something newer and better. Internet security suites have attempted to fill this void for a number of years, but the honest truth is that all of them are pretty much a failure.
It turns out that KickStarter has a project for iGuardian, a home Internet Security System. Even better, it has been totally funded and looks like it will become a reality! There are still some slots available, though, so you might want to check it out before the price goes up.
This is a device whose time has come. It won’t solve everything, and road warriors will still be vulnerable, I’m afraid, but at least this will tighten up security for home users. You really need a dedicated security device these days, as, in spite of various attempts to control it, the “WWW” might stand for either “World-Wide Web” or the “Wild, Wild West”.
