ISSUE 23.34 • 2026-08-24 ON SECURITY By Susan Bradley It all started when I was assisting someone who was trying to determine whether their Wi-Fi mesh routers were operating at the best possible speed. I tried to log in to the Web-based interface to the mesh system, which indicated that browser access was disabled. Uh-oh. […]

PUBLIC DEFENDER By Brian Livingston Public water utilities in several US states were hit with coordinated hacker attacks on July 26–27, 2026. The intrusions temporarily knocked Internet-connected control devices offline, forcing some agencies to warn customers to boil tap water. No permanent poisonings occurred, but the exploits may be a hacker group’s test run or […]

ON SECURITY By Susan Bradley OpenAI’s recent attack on another company’s cloud instances reminds me that sometimes we forget the basics. As we understand the situation at the moment, OpenAI’s test platform was meant to be isolated and not connected to the Internet. But because it needed to download certain items, it was given read-only […]

NETWORKING By Simon Bisson Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) routers are more secure than you think — although they could do with a little help from their friends. Way back when we used dial-up to connect to the Internet, software firewalls such as ZoneAlarm were all we needed to protect our PCs — because slow-speed connections […]