About 800,000 of the overall 24 milliion routers, used by hackers across the world to launch cyber attacks, are in the UK, increasing the risk of major disruption of the nation’s data networks, a new report revealed.
A new report from Nominum revealed that there has been a massive rise in digital criminals exploiting such routers to deliver massive attack traffic, in a bid to interrupt web services.
Nominum product marketing director Bruce van Nice told Guardian that all that traffic coming back down to the user can saturate the access network.
"What the user sees is what appears to be an outage or an intermittent or slow service," Nice added.
"The user doesn’t know anything about what is going on."
The report added that hackers have started innovating to bolster their attacks more efficiently by developing websites with domain names that offer better responses.
On a single day during the year, the report noted that about five billion requests were recorded for such domains, which generated about 12tb of traffic data flying exclusively for malicious means.
"There’s like this backdoor that’s been opened to ISP networks, these home routers expose them," Nice added.
