COVID continues its vice-like grip on the world!  People have changed their work styles and work from home.  Everyone is trying to stay safe, and also productive.  However, a recent study showed that the 127 most popular home routers, from the seven most popular brands, had security vulnerabilities.  Germany’s Freihofer Institute for Communication said that even the latest shipping versions of several devices had flaws.  This means that even if employees patched their IoT or router firmware to the latest available versions, their companies would still be vulnerable to known hacks.  Hence, employees may be safe from biological viruses at home, which is good.  However, employers are more vulnerable to malware, as hackers use publicly-known vulnerabilities to take over home routers.  However, an RPA-based security solution is available to stop, start and patch IoT devices.  GBC’s FUNAuto is a boon in these times of COVID.

Server Operating Systems are secure–but only if regularly updated.

This is particularly unfortunate.  90% of routers run the relatively safe Linux operating system.  Windows is also much more secure nowadays.  In both cases, however, the safety protocols can only be effective if the systems are patched.  The simple fix is for router vendors to just install the latest patches on a regular basis.

FKIE’s findings are disturbing.

In some cases, FKIE found that vendors had hard-coded well-known passwords and cryptographic keys into the firmware.  As FKIE notes in its report, “Many routers are affected by hundreds of known vulnerabilities. Even if the routers got recent updates, many of these known vulnerabilities were not fixed”.  On the positive side, however, this means that the fix is simple.  All we need to do patch these routers in a safe and secure manner.

However, the solution is open-source and freely available.

Fortunately, for router manufacturers, however, a secure, open-source method to patch these systems does exist.  GBC’s FUNAuto has an Enterprise SaaS option.  It applies the latest patches to all IoT devices.  This includes routers. This means that from a single location, on the Public Cloud or a secure data center, a solution like FUNAuto can update remote devices.  The trick is to use RPA (Robotic Processing Automation) to update the systems, and update the sources for the remote routers.

Get in Touch Now.

If you are a small or large IoT device manufacturer and need to patch your devices, please contact GBC at [email protected].  A Technical Specialist will help you download a free version of the software. If you would like to see a demo, that is also available online at https://onlinegbc.com//autoai.

So there we have it:  difficult problem, simple solution.  That is GBC’s FUNAuto, using secured, open-source code to stop, patch, update and start or restart remote routers.  All Unix, Linux and Windows-based devices are covered so compatibility is rarely an issue.  All we have to do is implement the solution and make these COVID times safer for people and their work!