Change your home Wi-Fi name and default passwords
Have you left your home Wi-Fi name as "Netgear"? Or worse still have you changed it to your address "12 Abbey Road", to make it easy for your family and friends to remember? This also makes it easy for the bad guys to target. The trick is to make it really hard for anyone to match your Wi-Fi with your house. Much better to use a random word or funny phrase. If you just leave it as the original Wi-Fi name it signals that you have probably left the all the default settings the same including the password.
The oldest known vulnerability has been around since 1969 and it is simply that computers sometimes have the username ‘admin’ with the password also ‘admin’.
In 2012 an anonymous security researcher created a botnet to map out the internet. The researcher was able to find 1.2 million computers on the internet that had this vulnerability. They managed to scan over 3.6 billion IP addresses and create the very first map for the internet. You can see it here: https://darknetdiaries.com/imgs/carna.gif.
This was an example of a benign botnet but today over 30% of internet traffic is made up of bad bots used by cyber criminals to steal your data. They are taking control of your home router with default credentials.
If this is you, change it right now and do it for all your network connected devices. Cameras, thermostats, doorbell, locks, smartTV…