That talk with my neighbor about his router changed my mind

He told me he never changed the default admin password on his Wi-Fi router because he figured nobody would bother hacking a suburban house. I looked at his setup and saw he was still using WPA2 from 2015... has anyone else dealt with neighbors who just don't see the risk?

2 comments

2 Comments

rowan_hayes12d ago

I see where you're coming from about his router being outdated, but I don't think he's totally wrong. Nobody's really going to hack a suburban house unless they're doing some wide automated scan for specific vulnerabilities (like that old WPA2 Krack attack from 2017). The bigger risk is probably someone using his open Wi-Fi to do something illegal, not breaking into his network to steal his Netflix password. But here's the thing - he's using WPA2 from 2015, which still works fine for most people. I've seen neighbors with routers from 2012 running WEP because they never updated anything, and those are way more at risk. So yeah, he might be a little lax, but it's not the disaster some folks make it out to be.

haydenburns12d ago

See his point but still think updating once a decade is pretty lazy. WPA2 from 2015 might not be a huge risk, but firmware updates also fix random bugs and stability issues. Just spend 30 mins updating it and move on.