BT currently supply over 4 million UK customers with broadband – when you consider that the wireless BT Home Hub router comes free with Options 2 and 3 and is available as an upgrade to Option 1 customers, that means there’s a lot of shiny white (or black) boxes in people’s homes.
The Home Hub has been something of a success story for BT, although there has been a fair amount of criticism – firstly, it emerged that part of the Hub runs on Linux-based code which is open source based and under the terms of General Public Licence, should not be sold without the complete code being published.
Then it was suggested by Messers. Adrian Pastor and Petko D. Petkov that the security features of the Hub could be easily compromised by malicious drive-by pharmers attempting to freeload off of others connections and steal sensitive data. When you consider that, according to surveys by anti-virus firm Symantec, around 50% of broadband users in the UK don’t know how to fully configure the security settings of their routers, this means that up to 2 million UK residents are vulnerable to some potentially nasty hackage.
To address this, BT have announced the release of their new Home Hub, which comes with vastly improved security features which will automatically refresh and update every time a user logs on.
According to BT, the new Hub “has been redesigned to make it even easier for the customer” to set up security details, plus the new Hub boasts a “sleeker, smaller” exterior and ” a built-in firewall that we’ve pre-configured… to keep hackers and other intruders out, [to] make sure [that] computer and personal files are kept safe.”
The new look Hub will eventually be dispatched to new BT Broadband customers, with Option 1 customers being able to pay the one-off fee as usual. As of yet it’s not known whether existing BT customers with the version 1.0 Hubs can trade in their older models for this fitter, happier more productive edition, but we assume that it would be entirely possible.
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Darth Littlejohn said on 12 Oct 2007 at 3:05 pm #
I’ve had no issues with my Home Hub thus far… still, wouldn’t mind upgrading to this version when my contract runs out.