Some people are just paranoid.

In reply to a post by broadband66:

Some people are just paranoid.

Just because you are paranoid, it doesn't mean they are not out to get you.

In reply to a post by baby_frogmella:

It would be utterly bonkers for the OP to spend £100s on enterprise grade kit for a 3.5 Mb/s adsl line in a domestic environment. If consumer grade kit was that bad, all of us would be using £800 Juniper routers. Sure, home routers can be hacked but as long as you take the necessary steps such as using a strong WPA2 wifi password then the risk is greatly minimized. A bit like crossing the road...you can easily get run over if you don't look yet millions do this everyday without getting run over.

I wish these forums had a like option, i would certainly like this comment.

And I would like to like zyborg47's comment!

In reply to a post by GonePostal:

For the less technically adept like myself (running a first generation Billion 8800NL) what are the risks people like me face and what is the likelihood of it happening to an ordinary domestic user?

Virtully Zero,

i know a fair amount of people using older routers that have not been updated for a few years. they all seem fine. one is even using one of my old ADSL routers and the company went out of business years ago.

Depends on where you live too i would think. Most vulnerabilities require a person being within range of the router to exploit. So if you live in the middle of nowhere, or a quiet street with only a handful of houses having the range to connect to your router, you will more than likely be ok. Yes someone could drive up to your house and exploit your router that way, but what are the odds?

More higher if you live in say central London but even then id say very small

In reply to a post by bobble_bob:

Depends on where you live too i would think. Most vulnerabilities require a person being within range of the router to exploit. So if you live in the middle of nowhere, or a quiet street with only a handful of houses having the range to connect to your router, you will more than likely be ok. Yes someone could drive up to your house and exploit your router that way, but what are the odds?

I think you are confusing people leeching the router's wifi service with the security problem of hacking into the user's LAN and computers etc. through the net.

I get that some vulnerabilities can be from hacking a users LAN, but alot of vulnerabilities are also Man in the Middle attacks which require you to be in range of the router.

Also the methods used by hackers seems to be changing these days. They arent so bothered about performing sophisticated hacks on home users, they seem to be concentrating on attacking big businesses and local government departments where they can make much bigger money. As seen in the recent USA ransomware attacks.

The best form of security is still the user being aware and not clicking dodgy links and opening unknown attachments.

The sub-topic is about the security aspects of old routers with non-updated firmwares/firewalls which as a result can be picked up by non-targeted scattergun IP Address attacks.

Ransom attacks for instance are far from being confined to professional criminals aiming at major targets, and can come not just from links in dodgy emails but from fairly simply routines probing for known vulnerabilities in popular routers.

You are moving further and further from what was being discussed.

Bear in mind also that the HG612, the equivalent ECI �modem� and the Vigor 130 are all in fact modem/routers in bridge mode.

I don�t think they present a major security risk, but I also believe that anyone in this thread worrying about the security of those and other now unsupported kit have a valid concern, and that any attack is likely to come over the net rather than from a local baddie. All I was saying was that your opinion that they are most likely to come from someone in close proximity picking up the user�s router�s wifi connection traffic was way off beam.

Surely everyone just does a port scan of their router from another connection to see what ports and possible interfaces it has exposed on the WAN side.