


John Davidson

Three tips to stop hackers breaking into your home internet

John DavidsonColumnist

Once a month or so for the past six months, a computer on my home network has been sending me an email containing a worrying warning.

Someone is trying to break in.

The computer, which I use to store all my family photos and videos, is always connected to a similar computer in another suburb, and the two computers each maintain a copy of all my files just in case my house burns down or (far more likely) the hard disks on one or other of the machines fail.

Keep it secret. Keep it safe. Your security depends on strong passwords perhaps more than you know. Reuters

It's this connection (known as Secure Shell, or SSH connection) that the hackers have been targeting. When the computer on my home network detects that someone has made 10 incorrect guesses at the SSH password, it blocks all contact from the attacker's internet address, and lets me know.

One or two incorrect guesses, I don't hear about. Ten attempts from 10 different internet addresses, through to the keeper. It's only when I get 10 attacks from the same address in a short period of time that I get an alert.


I'm relating this story because there's no reason to think my home network is very different from anyone else's home network, including yours. Whether we know about it or not, computers on our networks often open connections (known in networking parlance as "ports") to connect to other computers, and these open ports attract attacks from the internet like ... Well, like honey attracts bees, it turns out.

In order to get a better picture of what it's like out there, and just how often my home networks is actually getting attacked, I recently installed an app on my home router that monitors all the router's ports for attacks, and plots the source of them on a map of the world.

It turns out, there's not just one break-in attempt on my network every month or so. In the week this app has been monitoring it, it's averaged around 100 attempts a day. On a bad day, when the Eye of Sauron turns its gaze in my direction, there are 250 attempts.

In light of the debate about the extent to which Australia and its allies should be using technology from Chinese companies, such as Huawei, DJI and ZTE, it's interesting to note that almost half the attacks (48 per cent at the time of writing) show up as being from China, from cities such as Zhengzhou (home of the Information Engineering University, run by the People's Liberation Army) and Wuhan (once home to a large hacker training site that the Chinese government said it shut down in 2010).

In the absence of any specific allegations, much less any proof presented to the public, it's difficult to say whether Huawei, DJI and ZTE are actually tools of a Chinese government hacking conspiracy, or merely caught up in a trade war between China and the US that's seeing the threat of hacking erected as a type of technical trade barrier.

But it's fair to say that the level of hacking activity originating out of China – ranging from the large-scale events you see reported in the media, to the small-scale events you see when you monitor your own home network – isn't helping their cause.

Then again, it's also worth noting that the second-most-popular launch pad for attacks on my home network is the US, at 15 per cent, well ahead of the Russian Federation at 6 per cent. There's nothing the US is accusing China of that it doesn't engage in itself.


As the Snowden leaks revealed, the NSA once hacked into Huawei's own servers and stole the source code to its products: the very thing the US is now complaining China does.

The question for us mortals caught up in all this is, who do we want to be hacked by? China or the US?

My own answer to that is: no one!

Three security tips

It's a bit of a pipedream to hope that our private information can be secure when we so readily give it away to companies with appalling cyber-security histories, such as Facebook, but nonetheless there are some things you can do to mitigate against the worst of it.

No.1 is to use secure passwords, which is to say passwords like "8mqV7d6j^n#knarT" that hackers aren't going to guess in a million attempts, much less 10, for anything that even vaguely matters to you. And never use the same password twice.

Who's hacking me? This map shows where the attacks on my home network come from. 


In practice, this means using a password manager such as LastPass, which stores your passwords in an encrypted file that wouldn't expose them even if the company LastPass itself was hacked, and which fills in passwords for you when you need them.

No.2 is to minimise the area exposed to attack. Log into your home network router, have a poke around, and shut down any ports that don't need to be open. For ports that do need to stay open, make sure the devices using them use secure passwords, or better yet don't use passwords at all, but public key certificates when they're an option.

They're tricky and time-consuming to install, but vastly less susceptible to the sorts of brute-force attacks that (it turns out) are worryingly commonplace on the internet.

And No.3 is, don't use Facebook any more than you absolutely have to. It has a track record of accidentally-on-purpose leaking your details to its paying customers. Never forget, Cambridge Analytica didn't hack anyone when it harvested data on more than 50 million Facebook users. It used a tool supplied to it by Facebook itself.

John Davidson

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