The most recent 2025 Broadband Genie router safety survey reveals alarming tendencies in community safety consciousness amongst web customers.
This yr’s outcomes, whereas displaying marginal enhancements in some areas, underscore the persistent hole between understanding easy methods to safe a community and truly taking motion.
The analysis group performed their fourth complete router safety survey to match attitudes and behaviors throughout 2018 by 2025.
Out of three,242 surveyed customers, the findings exhibit that regardless of seven years of prior analysis highlighting safety dangers, nearly all of households stay susceptible to cybercriminals by unchanged default router configurations.
Earlier research constantly confirmed that the overwhelming majority of web customers had been unaware of the safety implications related to leaving default settings intact.
The 2025 knowledge means that whereas some progress has been made, important vulnerabilities stay widespread throughout residential networks.
Firmware Stay Essential Considerations
Probably the most regarding discovering entails the administrator password, with 81% of respondents by no means altering their router’s default credentials.
This represents solely a marginal 5% enchancment from 2024 ranges, indicating that the overwhelming majority of customers are leaving their networks vulnerable to unauthorized entry.
Default router credentials are publicly obtainable info, making them trivial targets for malicious actors searching for community entry.
Equally troubling is the 84% of web customers who’ve by no means up to date their router firmware. Firmware updates tackle important safety vulnerabilities and supply important patches that shield units from identified exploits.
The development over the previous six years exhibits fewer folks prioritizing firmware updates, although 2025 did see a slight 5% enchancment year-over-year.
Regardless of this minor progress, leaving firmware outdated stays a widespread vulnerability vector that exposes networks to compromise.
Community naming conventions additionally current safety considerations, with 85% of respondents sustaining their router’s default community identify.
Whereas this represents a 4% enchancment in comparison with 2024, it stays beneath 2018 ranges. Default community names like “SKY12345” or “Linksys-7890” make it significantly simpler for attackers to establish particular router fashions and goal identified vulnerabilities related to these units.
Data Hole Stays the Major Barrier
Maybe most revealing is that 79% of survey respondents indicated they know easy methods to change router settings, but 73% don’t perceive why they need to make these modifications.
This vital consciousness hole has endured for the previous three years, suggesting that consumer schooling efforts have did not successfully talk the dangers related to default configurations.
He famous that cybercriminals exploit firmware vulnerabilities to achieve entry to private info and launch subsequent phishing assaults.
Moreover, solely 31% of respondents repeatedly examine which units are related to their house networks, leaving potential unauthorized entry undetected.
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The survey exhibits that 69% of customers have by no means modified their Wi-Fi password, and 47% have by no means adjusted any manufacturing facility settings in any respect.
Nonetheless, this 47% determine represents the bottom fee because the first 2018 research, indicating a 5% enchancment from 2024.
McAfee Senior Safety Researcher Oliver Devane emphasised that routers function the first gateway to all related house units, making their safety paramount.
The answer requires coordinated efforts from web service suppliers, producers, and customers to prioritize community safety by password modifications, firmware updates, and common community monitoring.
The trail ahead calls for elevated producer transparency, simplified safety configuration processes, and sustained public schooling campaigns to slender the awareness-to-action hole that at present defines residential router safety.
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