The Security Mentor

I've written about this before but it just keeps happening. Those little networking "appliances" are small computers with software written in a hurry by companies that are not always security conscious.

One recent example is a wireless router, the Acrowave AAP-3100AR. It is reported to have a bug allowing anyone to administer it from the Internet. Presumably this would allow turning off firewall features.

D-Link provided another recent example with a DSL modem/router that can be reprogrammed over the net by anybody.

I'm not sure what to suggest for protection except maybe to do belt-and-suspenders engineering with software like Zone Alarm on each machine behind your hardware firewall. The good news is that all these pieces of equipment are cheap enough to throw away. The bad news is that the manufacturers don't always make fixes available. All the big-name vendors have had egg on their faces, so it's not like there's some brand you can buy with a great security record.

If you don't mind the noise and the electric bills you could set up a spare computer with two network cards and some well-tested software and build your own firewall.