Millions off home routers are at risk of hacking, the Ponemon Institute says the cloud makes data breaches pricey, BitDefender finds that Canadian moms are clueless about what their kids do online, and Research in Motion announces BlackBerry Protect.

Craig Heffner, a researcher with Maryland-based security consultancy Seismic, will be releasing a security tool at this month’s Black Hat conference that he claims could affect most Linksys and Dell routers.

The attack is a new take on a familiar strategy called DNS rebinding, wherein users are tricked to going to a web page that can hijack the router and either steal information or re-route the browser.

Most updated browsers have safeguards to stop accessing information that's not at their registered IP address, but a site can have multiple IP addresses in order to balance traffic among multiple servers or provide backup options.

Heffner's trick is to create a site that lists a visitor's own IP address as one of those options. The good news is that a bad guy has to first get access to the router, and there are potential fixes, although the free DNS replacement OpenDNS and the Firefox NoScript plug-in won't prevent the exploit.

The solution: make sure your router's firmware is updated and patched and, perhaps most important, that you’re not using default security settings.

The cloud makes data breaches pricey

The Ponemon Institute and PGP Corporation have released the inaugural Australian Cost of a Data Breach report aimed to quantify the costs associated with public and private sector data breaches.

What they found was that remedying a data breach costs 40% more for businesses that store their data offshore, a study of Australian incidents has found.

All told all of the sixteen organisations that participated in the study experienced one or more data breach incidents during the past year. These involved between 3,300 and 65,000 compromised records, and cost an average of $123 per compromised record.

Interestingly, incidents that involved a third party a cloud computing or software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider had a higher average cost of $152 per record, compared to $109 for incidents that occurred and were handled in-house.

Canadian moms clueless about what their kids do online

A study commissioned by BitDefender has revealed that almost all (94%) of Canadian moms claim to know what their children are doing online. However, nearly 30% don't have a clue which social networking sites their kids are members of; and close to 60% don't use any form of parental controls to monitor online activities.

Canadians moms are aware of some of the questionable behaviour their kids are partaking in online, like having a fight (16%), chatting with someone they don't know (18%), downloading music illegally (12%), and creating a profile under an alias (10%).

BitDefender has called out some websites as being particularly dangerous.  Chatroulette, a free site for random video chats, can contain adult content, and on Formspring  teens leave crude and hurtful comments. As well, MyLOL is regarded as a Website for "teen dating," but according to BitDefender, kids as young as 13 years old can register, and the site contains "thousands" of adult users.

RIM announces BlackBerry Protect

Research in Motion (RIM) has officially announced its consumer-grade protection software for BlackBerry smartphones. Named Blackberry Protect, the new service lets customers not attached to a BlackBerry Enterprise Server:

    * Protect important information on a lost BlackBerry smartphone by remotely wiping or locking the device from your desktop

    * Remotely add contact information to the home screen of a locked BlackBerry smartphone so it can be returned if found

    * See your BlackBerry smartphone's location and pinpoint the current whereabouts of a lost or stolen device with cell tower and GPS device tracking

    * Find a nearby misplaced BlackBerry smartphone by remotely activating a loud ringer

    * Back up data from your BlackBerry smartphone (including Contacts and Calendar; Memos and Tasks; Browser Bookmarks and Text Messages) over Wi-Fi

    * Restore your data to a new BlackBerry smartphone, or simply switch from one BlackBerry smartphone to another