Skip to content

Biting the hand that feeds IT

The Register ®

Hardware:


Related Whitepapers

[Print][Mobile][Alerts]

BT battens down Home Hub backdoor

Lockdown shuts out pwners

Published Monday 22nd October 2007 12:42 GMT

BT has sealed a critical security hole in the Home Hub that offered hackers full control of the router, which is in about two million UK homes.

The firm's latest update has kneecapped part of the router's firmware called Remote Assistance, which gives customer support staff admin rights to investigate problems.

A BT spokesman said service will be unaffected by disabling the feature, since support can still access the Home Hub using the separate Remote Access feature. "Remote Assistance" will still appear in the router's menu page, but the link will return an error.

Earlier this month we reported how researchers had exploited a firmware bug to hurdle the Hub's admin password authentication. All it required was for a naive surfer to hit a malicious link.

BT's inhouse security team quickly launched an investigation. The firm had been criticised by the same researchers for failing to respond to a vulnerability in another of its routers reported last year.

BT's update on the Home Hub flap is here. ®

Track this type of story as a custom Atom/RSS feed or by email.
Previous Article Next Article
whitepaper title

How IT Management Can "Green" the Data Center

This Gartner research provides managers with an outline of the trends affecting datacenters and offers strategies with which to address these changes..
whitepaper title

Gartner Paper: US Data Centers

U.S. enterprise data centers face considerable space and energy constraints over the next few years. Download this free independent report to read more..
Whitepapers

Top 20 storiesAll The Week’s HeadlinesArchiveSearch