Routers made by Asus and Huawei have been exposed as being able to be easily hacked.
Millions of devices were exposed by the flaw that affected chips that power popular Wi-Fi routers.
According to researchers from ESET, a cyber security company the flaw was found in processors from Cypress Semiconductor and Broadcom and affected some of the most popular devices on the planet, including four generations of iPhone, one generation of MacBook and two generations of Amazon Echo.
The routers which house the affected chipsets were made by Asus and Huawei and are used widely in Australia.
The problem revealed at a security conference this week, exposed data being transmitted from a device over both a business and home network.
Specifically, the exploit, dubbed KrØØk allowed hackers to tinker with the encryption of data communicated between a device and the router, causing it to change from a random string of characters to all zeroes and effectively rending the encryption useless.
Researchers say that the vulnerability is related to a previously discovered vulnerability called KRACK (key re installation attacks) that affected routers using the WPA 2 protocol – a system used by many home consumer electronics for accessing the internet.
They say that KRØØk is likely to be one of the root causes of the KRACK flaw.
Though most companies have already issued a patch for the vulnerability which should have been downloaded automatically, researchers say that anyone worried about the security of their networks can make sure all their hardware is safe by downloading the latest software update.
