Home Router Woes

 Got D-Link and/or ASUS on your home network?

 Good: A total of 5 vulnerabilities in some D-Link routers allows external access to the router bypassing and/all authentication. You do not want anyone of the 5 billion folks on the internet to have access to your home router. For some D-Link routers a firmware update to address the vulnerabilities will not be made available. If your D-Link router has a firmware update available, update the firmware.

Visit the D-Link support page, find your router, download and update the firmware.

Bad: ASUS has another problem. Phishing, Pop-up, and drive-by campaigns are offering router firmware updates that then infect your ASUS router, then the network it is protecting.

To protect your ASUS router, visit the administrator page on the router, use the Advanced or Management page to apply an update.

Got VPN?

Good, maby

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a method of increasing privacy. With a VPN installed, enabled, and used Internet traffic travels through an encrypted tunnel thus limiting capture and analysis while in transit.

Choosing a VPN application from any of hundreds of VPN service providers can be a challenge. VPN offerings that are "free" will gain their revenue via ads and/or selling your traffic history and logs.

Sage advice is to use a VPN provider with a "NO LOG" policy and hosted in a country with some privacy policy.

This week 7 VPN providers with said "NO LOG" policies were found to not only capturing user's logs, but loosing control of those logs. Said logs were found on publicly accessible cloud servers.

The logs contained email addresses, clear text passwords, IP addresses, home addresses, billing addresses, phone models, device IDs, etc.

The VPN providers: UFO VPN, FAST VPN, Free VPN, Super VPN, Flash VPN, Secure VPN, and Rabbit VPN.

If you ever installed or used a VPN from any of the listed providers, be aware your private data was available on a public Internet cloud server this week (July 2020)

Internet NOT down

 Varied outages and reports of outages on the Internet today (17-July-2020).
Appears root cause was mis-configured router on Internet backbone.  Again.

Updates/Upgrades abound yet again

 Apple released iOS 13.6 and iPadOS 13.6 today as well as updates for tvOS 13.4.8, watchOS 6.2.8, and audioOS 13.4.8 for HomePod.

 Google released updates to Chrome and the browsers with Chromium engines have or will follow.

 Microsoft had patch Tuesday with 123 vulnerabilities patched, 17 critical.
Microsoft also patched a SERIOUS flaw in their server DNS service that was dreamed wormable.

 Apple released yet another beta for MacOS with the public beta for Big Sur soon.

 Firefox update as well.

 A few of our windows systems are now eligible for the 2004 feature update.