A Hacker Is Breaking Into People's Routers And Patching Them So They Can't Be Abused By Other Hackers

October 16, 2018

A hacker is breaking into people's routers and making changes to their settings to prevent abuse by cyber-criminals.

The internet vigilante, who goes by "Alexey", claims to have disinfected over 100,000 MikroTik routers already. He boasts about his hobby on a Russian blogging platform.

"I added firewall rules that blocked access to the router from outside the local network," Alexey said. "In the comments, I wrote information about the vulnerability and left the address of the @router_os Telegram channel, where it was possible for them to ask questions."

Alexy says he's been only fixing MikroTik routers that have a vulnerability that came to light earlier this year. Security researcher Troy Mursch told ZDNet that over 420,000 MikroTik routers currently connected to the internet show signs they've been infected with cryptocurrency-mining scripts.

MikroTik has made the patches available online, but it's up to home users to make the updates.

In the meantime, Alexey is doing what he can to help others. But technically speaking, Alexey is on the wrong side of the law. Despite his good intentions, it is illegal to access another person's equipment without consent.