The article makes it clear that the Chinese botnet is targeting Microsoft azure accounts, usually for large organizations involved with governments, infrastructure, legal professionals, science and technology.
It also states that the attacks can be disinfected by regularly restarting your router, but that this doesn’t prevent reinfection later.
The US intelligence services also says you should regularly restart your phone.
This is Microsoft’s posting about it which other news sources are quoting from: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2024/10/31/chinese-threat-actor-storm-0940-uses-credentials-from-password-spray-attacks-from-a-covert-network/
It has a recommendations section which suggests “credential hygiene” and strong passwords help.
I recently replaced my tplink for a Netgear I flashed openwrt on
Hell yeah another Openwrt enjoyer in the wild, what a rare occurrence. Flashed Openwrt 6ish month ago, have been very pleased with it.
You’re on Lemmy my dude. We all use Linux and Openwrt haha
For less money than some gaudy gaming wireless router that you end up replacing every 3 years, you can grab a Mini PC with two NICs, a wireless access point, and install OpnSense.
Your life will be irrevocably changed for the better.
Only go this route if you’re looking for a new hobby.
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Why does it matter ”what its designed for” a router is no better at it then a computer with 10x the brains you can route 10gig through them if you have the nics for it large company use pfsense and the like
The main issue is they have fans and the bios will sometime fail to boot. They are less reliable but much more powerful. It’s a tradeoff.
Ermmm router have fans mini pc actually doesn’t( at least mine mines fanless) routers also fail to boot but also that not a giant issue either way cause who’s turning on and off their router and any significant interval I have run time of 6 months before mines restarted and that’s due to software updates otherwise it would push a whole year
I have never had a household router that had a fan in it. Fanless mini pcs do exists they are rarer and usually more expensive and weaker.
The rebooting problem comes from micro interruption in the power grid. Yes you can add a UPS, but then these will become the main reason why the internet is down (I have a whole stack of APC branded UPS with failed batteries)
Newer WiFi 6 routers tend to have fans cause they get fairly warm but I’ve had a ups on mine for literally years and had to replace the battery in it once but before I got one even I still never had that problem we haven’t had a power outage in like a year or 2 now and I maybe happens once a year if it does so I don’t see your problem and I have it set to auto turn back on when it gets ac power so it’s a non issue
Not possible for every device, plenty of TP-Link xDSL modem/routers out there.
one of the reasons i use openwrt
So I just added a TP-Link switch (TL-SG3428X) and access point (EAP670) to my network, using OPNSense for routing. I’m still within the return window for both items. I understand the article mentions routers, but should I consider returning these, and upping my budget to go for ubiquity? The AP would only be like $30 more for an equivalent, so that’s negligible, but a switch that meets my needs is about 1.6x more. And still only has 2 SFP+ ports, while I need 3 at minimum.
Go to openwrt. Or get something better with good security. Unifi is good and very expansible but it doesn’t have opensource software compatibility. Sad really.
Not all routers are in there. Buddy of mine just bought a new TP-Link router and it’s not listed.
…which is why you check if it’s listed before you buy it.
I mean, that makes sense to some. But not reasonable for an average user. He just did a search for top rated, recommended routers and bought what all these crappy sites recommend. He tried to do the needful.
The average user isn’t going to replace the firmware in a wireless router, so if it sucks out of the box, it’s just going to suck and they’ll never think to make it not so.
The first word in getting into FOSS or open anything should be compatibility before you even get to the store.
If not, then… well, I hope you keep the receipt.
This makes me want to call up the former CTO of the MSP I worked for who disagreed with me when I said TP-Link and other consumer hardware was a risk we shouldn’t let our customers take and tell him that he’s a miserable drunk who destroyed a company by taking a role he had no business in.
Well post the call recording on LinkedIn if you do
Only if he shows me that he wasn’t destroying the company, but building networks to leverage crises into profit.
Which, it would seem, is what he and the rest of the C-suite team did.
They bought out the old owners and signed up a bunch of new customers that we didn’t understand how to work with (new industries with different requirements, we were very specialized toward a few professions and our staff’s knowledge and skills reflected that). They also brought in fresh, inexperienced people to manage the clients, so we didn’t really get very good on-boarding results and didn’t generate good documentation for the help desk to work off of. Right off the bat we did a bad job for these new customers and it took us a long time to do it, while our long-time customers had their wait times go up by an unacceptable amount.
My team was running at their limits, but I was not allowed to let up at all because we needed to get the tickets down. 9 hours days were the minimum, 9.5-10 were the norm. We hadn’t hired any new people when we added the new clients and the new clients generated tickets at 1.75x the of rate existing clients, and they were still signed up more. After months of begging, they hired two people for Tier-3 positions without testing them technically. They were both from corp call centers and had previously read scripts with troubleshooting steps on them. Neither had ever logged into a router. This is where I quit.
Within four months of my departure (and a few others at my level around the same time, we had all had enough) the company had lost 30% of their clients, two of which were huge 250-person entities that were cash cows for biling. Four months later the owner-operators sold the whole thing to another company, getting high level jobs, equity and cash out of it. As far as I know they’re all still working for the bigger company. Even if they lost money buying and selling, chances are they’re on top in the long run.
Wow gross. Glad you got out, I doubt many of your colleagues did well from the buyout.
One of the benefits of having a number of middle managers leave is a few of the folks in the trenches get a chance to move up. Two of my team members were there in management through 2023, which is a number of years after everything went down. I don’t know what their compensation looks like, but I know they must have gotten a 15% bump at the least jumping up during the exodus. They were the last two from the staff still at the company.
