Experts told which manufacturers' routers are the safest

Scientists at the Fraunhofer University of Communications (Germany) made a large-scale comparisonHome routers security report 2020 security of 127 home routers from seven popular manufacturers: Asus, Netgear, D-Link, Linksys, TP-Link, Zyxel and AVM. They checked the current firmware of each device for known vulnerabilities - and none of them turned out to be perfect.

Of the 127 devices, 46 haven't received a single security update in the past year, while another 22 haven't received one in two years. The record holder among the studied and did not update at all 1 969 days, or about 5 years. Researchers noted that ASUS, AVM and Netgear performed best - all of their routers have been updated at least once in the last 1.5 years. D-Link, Linksys, TP-Link and Zyxel could not boast of such.

Although about 90% of these routers run Linux, many manufacturers do not update the operating system - many are still running the 2.6 (or lower) kernel, which hasn't been updated since February 2011. This makes routers more vulnerable.

In only 50 devices, login data (default username and password) were good enough encrypted, while in 16 routers getting this data will not be for hackers at all labor. ASUS is the only company that does not leave this data in the firmware image (even in a well-encrypted form).

So which routers are safe?

The study concluded:

What kind of router do you use? Let us know in the comments!