Vint Cerf and 260 experts give FCC a plan to secure Wi-Fi routers

“We can't afford to let any part of the Internet’s infrastructure rot in place,” Vint Cerf told the FCC. Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet, is fed up with the seemingly endless supply of security vulnerabilities in Wi-Fi routers. He’s not alone as more than 260 global network and cybersecurity experts believe the state of Wi-Fi routers is “dismal” and the FCC’s proposals to secure such devices risks “permanently locking in place buggy and insecure software.”

It seems like every time you turn around, another router is deemed vulnerable to being hacked; in fact Netgear just published new firmware after publicly disclosed vulnerabilities and reports of up to 10,000 routers being taken over. It’s such an epidemic that a vigilante has been infecting routers and other Linux-running IoT devices in order to secure them and keep the devices protected from other potential malware infections. Even after critical vulnerabilities in router firmware have gone public, it often takes vendors a horrendously long time to release new “secured” versions. As Michael Horowitz politely put it, the software in routers is “buggy as heck.”

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