TIL that In 2018, A hacker broke into people’s routers (100,000 of them) and patched their vulnerabilities up so that they couldn’t be abused by other hackers.
A mysterious grey-hat is patching people's outdated MikroTik routers
Internet vigilante claims he patched over 100,000 MikroTik routers already.
lol, reminds me of when I was at some random hotel in China and their router was clearly infested with malware that kept redirecting websites to random scammy websites. I guessed the router IP and used the default password for the router (probably why they got compromised) to update and patch it.
This person did it on a global scale
Pretty decent thing to do. When I was a website developer, around 2012 I dealt with a mentally unstable friend/client who one day started seeing porn ads on a blog that he asked me to fix up on behalf of someone else. He freaked out "NICK CAN'T SEE THAT, OMG". I looked at the site on 4 different devices from 3 IP addresses and didn't see what he was talking about. Since it was my job to figure this out, I asked some people we knew on a forum "will you please look at this site and let me know if you see any porn ads?" 25 people responded that no, they did not. Okay. So I told him, hey, I had everyone on our forum check it out and it's fine, so it has to be a virus on your computer or something. He got super angry and told me it was VERY embarrassing to him that I did that (like, wtf was I supposed to do?). Eventually someone figured out he had a hacked router.
I worked with a client where their router got hacked, but the site manager insisted that it wasn't, because he had an "unhackable" Macbook. Like, no, buddy. No. Every Windows 98 client, the Windows NT 4.0 server, and your router are totally, totally hacked, and pointing to Chinese DNS. "UHHH NOOO?? IT's a MAAAAAC! Hello? Anyone in there, Windows guy? I HAVE A MACBOOK!" With a patronizing chuckle. Then he mocked deaf people accents to re-explain, I guess, to make the point I was retarded.
Thankfully, his boss fired him on the spot. This was the THIRD time I was sent out there to wipe and reinstall, and my attendance of his firing was a mere formality. He was being hacked by an open Apple AirPort Base Station with no password or encryption that was inside the network, and refused to believe it because it was an Apple product. His boss understood, though.
Note: this is not meant to mock or deride any Apple product or fans thereof. Just this specific dweeb.
Wow, that guy does sound incredibly incompetent and unprofessional.
I feel like platform rivalry used to be worse in the past, like 20-30 years ago. Growing up I thought that people who owned Nintendos were my enemies because I had a Sega... as if I wouldn't have enjoyed NES or SNES games. Then that Microsoft was evil because I had an Amiga and then Linux. It could be because it seemed like platforms were more mortal threats to each other back then... DOS, Window and MS were out to snuff the Amiga (and it did, I guess), and Nintendo and Sony were out to destroy Sega (wait... I guess that did happen) and MS was out to crush Linux and Apple (to be fair, they were, and almost did in the case of Apple). So I suppose there were some reasons to feel that way, but I'm glad it's somewhat calmed down now.
"Maaaa, someone broke into our house to fix our doors again."
Me and a buddy once set up a script to change hundreds of peoples wifi name to "Call your ISP". After they refused to believe us when we told them they had misconfigured things(They forgot to whitelist their own IPs and change passwords, so anyone on the same subnet could use the default password to access the ISP admin part of the modem/router combo they sent out).
Jokes on them, I never connect my router to the internet.
This doesn't even seem like it'd be that hard to do. Might be a fun side project
If you're bad at it sure. But if you're bad at it you wouldn't try it in the first place
If you scripted it, sure. But it would suck writing that script.
lol I’ve done this before. But to like 3-4 networks not 100k. And in Canada
That would be white-hat, not grey-hat
It's still grey hat since he didn't have permission, but was doing it for a cause that many deem good
This might be the most Chaotic Good thing I've ever seen.