How to Check Your Home Network for Vulnerabilities

Why Home Routers Get Targeted

Home routers are often left with their out-of-the-box settings for years, with firmware updates rarely top of mind for most users. Combined with being permanently connected to the internet, they're an efficient target for attackers: find one vulnerability, and it can potentially be scanned and attacked automatically across countless devices. In fact, many botnets (in the Mirai family and others) have spread primarily by infecting routers and IoT devices with known vulnerabilities.

What Is a CVE?

CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) is a common identifier assigned to individual software or hardware vulnerabilities. Written in a format like "CVE-2024-XXXXX," it acts as a shared vocabulary that lets security researchers and vendors worldwide discuss the same vulnerability unambiguously.

What Is the CISA KEV Catalog?

Among all CVEs, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) publishes a "Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog" listing vulnerabilities confirmed to actually be exploited by attackers in the wild. Because it's narrowed down to vulnerabilities with confirmed real-world exploitation — not just theoretical risk — it's a key resource for prioritizing what to fix.

ShieldGuard NET cross-references public data from this KEV catalog and the NVD (National Vulnerability Database) against the vendor and model of devices it detects, to surface devices that are "actually at risk right now."

Checking It Yourself

1. Log into your router's admin page: Often reachable in a browser at an address like 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1 (varies by model).
2. Check the vendor, model, and firmware version: Usually shown on the admin page's home screen or a system-info page.
3. Check support status on the manufacturer's site: Search "[model] end of life" to see if it's been declared EOL.
4. Update the firmware to the latest version: Many models support manual updates from the admin page.

ShieldGuard NET's role is to automate this manual process across every device on your network, and cross-reference the results against a known-vulnerability database.

What Not to Do

Summary

• Home routers are attractive targets because they're rarely updated and always online
• A CVE is a common vulnerability identifier; the KEV catalog lists vulnerabilities confirmed to be actively exploited
• Checking the model and firmware from the admin page and cross-referencing official manufacturer info is the basic approach
• Only ever scan a network you administer yourself