Are we April fools, or just foolish?

We’ve made it through April Fools Day without an incident with the Conficker worm. Perhaps it has taught us a lesson or two. There have been a lot of people getting their computers “up-to-date” these last few days with the threat of something possibly happening. That has to be a good thing. Some of us will be a little more confident in our “effective posture” on April 2nd. Let’s see if we can keep up the good work without becoming complacent after a few days go by!

Another new threat emerged this past week – a new worm that is targeting routers – primarily home routers. It is supposed to be very stealthy – that means it will be hard to detect that you have been compromised! Many of us have our home wireless routers in place – perhaps we did our due-diligence when we set them up. But many people have put them in place without understanding what they do, or taking the time to change the default passwords! So this brings up a couple of basic security premises for routers:
1) Always change the default password! 2) Patch! Patch! Patch! 3) Turn off management access from the Internet.

So - we're back again to passwords and patches! And - why expose our management interface to the Internet if we don't need to? It's sort of like looking your front door!