The spread of wi-fi router malware revisited

A study projected that a targeted malicious attack on Wi-Fi routers could infect a region in two days. The study also argued that the use of WPA security protocol in 60-70% routers would practically prevent such epidemics. This paper revisits their model with current Wi-Fi router data from WiGLE. net and a refined data selection method. We examine the temporality and scale of the malware spread applying these two updates. Despite≈ 88% WPA adoption rate, we see a rapid malware spread occurring in a week and infecting≈ 34% of all insecure routers (≈ 5.4% of all) after two weeks. This result is significantly higher than the original study projection. It occurs due to the increased use of Wi-Fi routers causing a more tightly connected graph. We argue that this projected risk can increase when current vulnerabilities introduced and connected devices are considered. Ultimately, a thorough consideration is needed to assess cybersecurity risks in Wi-Fi ecosystem and evaluate interventions to stop epidemics.

Recommended citation: Kavak, Hamdi; Vernon-Bido, Daniele; Padilla, Jose J; Diallo, Saikou Y; Gore, Ross J. (2017). "The spread of wi-fi router malware revisited." Proceedings of the 20th Communications & Networking Symposium. 1-10.
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