fun fact, part of the reason this botnet exists is because europe required the ability to install security updates unattended that you cannot disable and they compromised one of the servers that had the capability to push these updates compromising hundreds of thousands of routers.
If the vendor can't even secure their update server; how long do you think it would be until some RCE on these 100k un-patchable routers gets exploited?
The only people to blame for this is the vendor, and they failed on multiple levels here. It's not hard to sign a firmware, or even just fetch checksums from a different site than you serve the files from...
the problem is that these laws just make the problem bigger - instead of having to compromise 100 thousand routers they can just compromise a single update server from a vendor that doesn't care about security.
the fallout is some companies losing their revenue: https://status.neoprotect.net/ and other headaches for people all over the world
But that's already true for most cases and devices. Most people using most devices let auto updates just happen.
And the other option isn't that much better, because "don't do autoupdates because maybe the update server is compromised" leads to a bunch of unsecured devices everywhere.
The only "real" solution is also completely unrealistic: Every private person disables auto updates, then reads the change log, downloads updates manually, and checks them against some checksum.
The better solution would be to simply increase fines until morale improves.
I tried to read this page, but it keeps refreshing itself and resetting the scroll position to the very top. Since I'm on mobile, I can't do anything about this easily and it's worse because it takes longer to figure out where to scroll to to continue.
ok, let's redo this: instead of routers it's an IoT device. The router protects the IoT device from direct access so it is secure from majority of attack vectors - now an IoT device provider gets their server compromised and hundreds of thousands of IoT devices are now bots in a botnet due to the ability to forcefully push a security update.
I don't think it does outweigh the benefits, the real benefits would be punishing or/and banning vendors that do not secure their devices since using laws such as "timely updates" just promotes them to include sloppy (insecure) implementations for pushing said updates just to do bare minimum to comply with the law.
might be too old, my asus router updated and I could no longer disable updates and you could just look up the relevant law here: EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) 2024.
While it doesn't make it mandatory, it does require patching devices in a timely fasion which in other terms: requires forced updates - pushing updated firmware is not enough if you read between the lines.
Even stronger requirements come into effect at the end of 2027.
it's one of the (i believe) hundreds (at this point) of zero-days that is used to build this botnet, at this point they are using funds that they get from selling this botnet to purchase new zero days
