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Researchers have discovered a frightening new worm that targets routers and DSL/Cable modems rather than PCs themselves.  Called psyb0t or Bluepill, it is believed to have come from Australia and is armed with over 6,000 common usernames and 13,0000 passwords for 55 popular routers and modems, including the two most popular brands, Netgear and Linksys.

Since routers and modems are on 24/7 and allow unlimited attempts at logging on, they make ideal targets for hackers.  The worm is hard to detect and people with infected equipment would never know they had it.

The good news is the worm’s botnet functions appear to have been disabled, but not before infecting nearly 100,000 machines, and it still may be stealing personal information from the machines it infects.  It’s possible the initial infection was an experiment to see how well the new worm worked.

To protect yourself, make sure the usernames and passwords of your router and modems are hard to crack by using a combination of letters and numbers.  Too many people never change the default log in information (usually something like “admin” for username and “password” for the password, and in some cases the username is the brand name of the device, such as Linksys), and that leaves them wide open to hackers and scammers of all types.  Once someone is able to log on to your router they can disable its firewall and security and poke through your personal info, use your internet connection to send spam, and more. 

So change those passwords and usernames ASAP!

Read [PCWorld]