A group of white hat hackers, dubbed the White Team, has once again made headlines by compromising more than 70,000 home routers and apparently forcing their owners to make them secure against flaws and weak passwords.

The White Team is building a botnet of hundreds of thousands of home routers for a good purpose. The White Team of vigilante hackers built their own peer-to-peer botnet that infects routers to close off vulnerabilities, such as:

• Weak default passwords
• DNS poisoning
• Unauthorized access (backdoor)
• Disabled firewalls

The malware that the White Hat hackers use is dubbed "Linux.Wifatch" a.k.a "Wifatch" and is available on Github.

The White Team plans on using their botnet to protect between 150,000 and 200,000 devices from Lizard Squad attacks.

The hacker collective said: "The goal is to use (most) of the 60,000 nodes we have to connect to the hundreds of thousands of boxes that are too small for our normal disinfector and disinfect them remotely."

Source: The Hacker News