How to Update Your Routers Firmware. Toms Guide has said it again and again Your router is the most important part of your home internet setup. Its also probably the most vulnerable. Security researchers have become quite proficient at finding flaws in some of the most popular routers on the market, but home users generally arent as quick to update their devices in response to those findings. Credit Netgear. This is partially due to poor security practices on the users parts, but to be fair, router manufacturers dont always make it easy to update. Few routers update their firmware automatically, and even just accessing your routers web interface requires toying around with arcane IP addresses, usernames and passwords. You may have to manually download software you may have to flip your router over and read teeny, tiny serial numbers. In short, updating your routers firmware is a pain, but youve got to do it. While we cant give specific instructions on how to update every single model from every single manufacturer, weve scoured manufacturer websites to at least give you an easy starting point. Netgear Hacked Firmware December 2016' title='Netgear Hacked Firmware December 2016' />Chinese manufacturer DJI has announced that owners of its Spark drone have until September 1st to update their firmware to the latest version or be totally locked out. DDWRT is free Linuxbased firmware for several wireless routers, most notably the Linksys WRT54G including the WRT54GL and WRT54GS and Buffalo WHRG54s,WHRHPG54. These instructions should help you update your router and if not, theyll at least tell you where you can go next for more detailed steps. Grab a magnifying glass, and lets go. Amped Wireless. Amped Wireless makes some of our favorite routers for gamers. Thats convenient, because updating Amped Wireless firmware takes a little tech know how that should sound familiar to anyone whos built a PC. While some of the companys routers can update their firmware automatically, the company website provides comprehensive details on how to do it if all else fails. Netgear Hacked Firmware' title='Netgear Hacked Firmware' />Briefly, go to the Amped Wireless website and visit its support section. Click on the drop down menu and select your routers model number. If youre not sure what that is, its physically written on your router somewhere probably the underside. Click the Downloads section and select Firmware. MORE Dont Rent Your Router Here Are the Best to Buy. After youve downloaded and unzipped the file I like to use 7 Zip, but your preferences may vary, connect your computer to your router with an Ethernet cable and enter setup. Click More Settings on the sites left panel, then Management, then Upgrade Firmware. Upload your unzipped file, and youre good to go. The router will take care of the rest. Asus. Newer Asus routers may have an option in the web interface to update firmware. Otherwise, youll have to do it the old fashioned way. First, visit the Asus website, then click Support, then Consumer and then search for your router. Be warned that the Asus search is very, very particular dont allow any errant spaces or missing hyphens. When youve reached the product page, click Support and Driver Tools, then select your OS. Wired reported that the leaked documents illustrate a range of methods used by the CIA, from rewriting the firmware in devices for remote monitoring of. A massive and sustained Internet attack that has caused outages and network congestion today for a large number of Web sites was launched with the help of. Recently I was asked to upgrade all our managed NETGEAR switches to the latest firmware to assist with network monitoring and troubleshooting. We werent trying to. After last weeks revelations that security flaws in certain Netgear routers were so bad that the US government warned against using them, and we could only advise. Scroll down to firmware and download the latest version. Once its on your hard drive, unzip it. In a web browser connected to the routers local network, enter 1. URL field and access the routers interface. If you never specified a username and password, theyre both admin. Go to the Configuration Page and select Firmware Version. Then, upload your unzipped file and let the router install the update. Asus also recommends you reset the router after the installation is complete by pressing the reset button on the routers underside for 5 seconds. D Link. D Link routers have been somewhat notorious for security holes as of late. So, its in your best interest to keep your firmware patched even more so than with other routers. The good news is that updating D Link routers is simple, even though it does require a little manual input. Credit D Link. First, ensure that youre on the same network as your router. Then, visit either dlinkrouter. Enter your password if you never set one up, just leave the field blank and log in. Once youre in the interface, click on Management, then Upgrade. Click the Check for new firmware button, and the router will handle the rest. Google. Updating a Google router could not be easier for better or worse. The system updates automatically, whether you want it to or not. You can get notifications about firmware updates, but you cant decide whether to install one. Generally speaking, this is a good thing, since youll never have to worry about your router being out of date. On the other hand, if Google were ever to introduce an exploitable update this really does happen, you wouldnt have any choice about applying it. Credit Google. If you have a Google router, just try to stay abreast of security news and reassure yourself that automatic firmware updates are the safer option 9. Linksys. Newer Linksys routers update their firmware automatically, but it never hurts to double check. To access the Linksys interface, enter www. Under Router Settings, click on Connectivity. MORE Top Rated Wi Fi Extenders to Boost Your Signal. From here, ensure youre on the Basic tab. Its the leftmost tab you should be there by default. Firmware Update will be the first option you see on the right side of the screen. Just click Check for Updates, and youre good to go. You can also check a box that says Automatic in order to enable automatic firmware updates. We recommend that you do so. Netgear. Some Netgear routers offer automatic firmware updates, but most dont. Luckily, updating the router yourself should take only a few minutes. Just remember to do it regularly. Credit Netgear. Go to a Web browser and enter either www. Enter your username and password admin and password for most models, if you havent changed them although some older models dont have usernames, then click on the Advanced tab on the top of the screen. Then select Administration from the left hand menu, and Router Update. From there, just click on the Check button, and your router will scour Netgears servers for an upgrade. And if your administrative credentials are still the factory defaults, change them as soon as youre done. TP Link. Since TP Link routers dont update their firmware automatically, youll have to dive into your routers browser interface and do some legwork yourself. Thanks to an unoptimized interface, youll have to take quite a few steps that most other routers dont make you go through. When connected to the same network as the router either wired or wirelessly, visit tplinkwifi. Credit TP Link. TP Link routers have a design flaw not present in other manufacturers devices firmware updates wipe your settings. As such, youll want to make a backup first. Do so by clicking the Advanced tab at the top of the screen, then System Tools, and Backup Restore. When thats done, return to System Tools and click on Firmware Upgrade. Under the Online Upgrade heading, youll find a button that says, Check for upgrade. Click it, and follow the routers instructions. After the installation, TP Link recommends that you perform a factory reset to ensure that the device registers the update properly. Under System Tools and Backup Restore, click Factory Restore. After that, theres still the matter of restoring your settings. In the Backup Restore menu, find the Restore heading. Then click Browse, find your saved file and select Restore. Yes, its a pain, and yes, you really have to do that every time. Top Wi Fi routers easy to hack, says study. Thirteen popular routers including the Netgear Centria WNDR4. Independent Security Evaluators. Dong NgoCNET. The Wi Fi router you use to broadcast a private wireless Internet signal in your home or office is not only easy to hack, says a report released today, but the best way to protect yourself is out of your hands. The report, written by research firm Independent Security Evaluators of Baltimore, found that 1. LAN or WLAN access. It also concludes that your best bet for safer Wi Fi depends on router vendors upping their game. All 1. 3 routers evaluated can be taken over from the local network, with four of those requiring no active management session. Eleven of the 1. 3 can be taken over from a Wide Area Network WAN such as a wireless network, with two of those requiring no active management session. My routers not safe Really It is not a safe assumption to make that youre safe, Steve Bono, the companys CEO and principal security analyst, told CNET in a phone interview. Now Playing Watch this. Home Wi Fi routers are easily hackable, says study. Driver For Hp Officejet 4500. The report notes that all 1. Before you dismiss router hacks as exceptionally rare, its important to note that theyve been a small but growing segment of computer security threats. In 2. 01. 1, one firmware vulnerability affecting six hardware manufacturers combined with two malicious scripts and 4. DNS servers to attack 4. Brazilian DSL modems, with the goal of stealing bank and credit card information. Craig Heffner, a vulnerability analyst at Maryland based Tactical Network Solutions, said that he isnt familiar with the Brazil story but isnt surprised by it. In a lot of countries, theres only one or two ISPs, and you get whatever router they give you, he said. They often enable remote administration by default, so any vulnerability would be amplified. And just yesterday, Read. Write reported on wireless router hacking, based in part on research conducted by security firm Rapid. ISEs study, while similar, reports all new findings, said ISEs marketing head, Ted Harrington. Harrington further explained why router hacking could turn into a big problem. Whats notable about this is that if you compromise the router, then youre inside the firewall. You can pick credit card numbers out of e mails, confidential documents, passwords, photos, just about anything, he said. He added that ISE plans to release additional information from the study in the coming weeks, following the routine security community best practice of giving vendors a chance to respond to vulnerabilities that have been uncovered before publishing them. We notified all vendors about all vulnerabilities that we found, said ISE security analyst Jake Holcomb. Were in the process of receiving Common Vulnerability and Exposure CVE numbers for tracking information security vulnerabilities. Some vendors, Holcomb said, got back to ISE quickly and had beta firmware with fixes ready to test within 7. Other vendors escalated their Tier 1 support up the chain but we never heard back from them, he said. Belkins latest Advance N9. DB Wireless Dual Band N Router. Belkin. Darren Kitchen, founder of the Hak. Wi Fi penetration testing devices, said he isnt surprised by the results of the study. Routers are low powered devices, most made in China and Taiwan, and theyre rushed out the door. Theres not a consumer demand for security its not a feature that will sell it. Wireless under attack. ISE found the routers were vulnerable to three kinds of attacks. Trivial attacks can be launched directly against the router with no human interaction or access to credentials. Unauthenticated attacks require some form of human interaction, such as following a malicious link or browsing to an unsafe page, but do not require an active session or access to credentials. Authenticated attacks require that the attacker have access to credentials or that default router credentials are used an all too common situation or that a victim is logged in with an active session at the time of the attack. The attacks were performed under both local adversary and remote adversary situations. A remote adversary is a threat that is not connected to the router via Wi Fi, while the local adversary is. The most common form of successful attack ISE used was the one click attack known as a cross site request forgery. Holcomb explained the testing methodology went beyond one click attacks in an e mail to CNET. Cross site request forgery was the first component of all of our attacks. After that, our standard attack was to reset the administrative password to a known value, or add a new administrator, and then enable remote management. Only when this was not possible e. Those included shell command injection, directory traversal to share the root of the filesystem over an Internet accessible ftp server, exploiting a race condition to upload shell scripts over ftp and then have them execute, enabling additional vulnerable services, and some more. There are more vulnerabilities in the routers, and were disclosing those, too, but theyre not necessarily part of this report were publishing. While none of the trivial attacks the weakest ones worked from a remote adversary, they were successful about one third of the time from a local attacker. Unauthenticated attacks were rarely successful from a remote attacker, but locally reached the same level of completion as local trivial attacks. Authenticated attacks were almost always successful from both adversaries. When youre remote, theres very little attack surface, explained Tactical Network Solutions Heffner. Routers tested included units such as the Linksys WRT3. Nv. 2, Netgear WNDR4. Belkin N3. 00 and N9. TP Link WR1. 04. N, and Verizon Actiontec, but Heffner cautioned that this was no guarantee that your router wouldnt be affected. In my experience. If my device is in this list, you should be concerned. If not, you still may want to be concerned, although its more difficult to say. Most routers Web interfaces come with similar items and are self explanatory. Dong NgoCNET. The report noted several caveats. Client side attacks were considered fair game, as long as they were running in a browser and based in HTML and Java. Script. The routers were not extensively tested for other vulnerabilities, and none of them had the remote administration features activated by default. This means that although many modern routers come with the ability to control them when not directly connected to the network, that feature is not active by default. Activating it decreases the routers security level. Also, before testing, the firmware for all the routers tested was upgraded to the most recent version. What you can do. Theres not much outside of common sense behavior that you can do to make your router more secure. Dong Ngo, a CNET Reviews senior associate technology editor and a wireless networking expert, was skeptical that many people would be affected by router hacks provided they follow some basic steps for securing their router. Part 5 of his home networking guide has some advanced security tips from Step 4 onward. Since there are certain requirements to be met for these hacking methods to be successful, if you set up your router properly, and practice prudence while being online, chances are youre safe.