By: MarkJ - 23 February, 2010 (12:28 PM) - Score: 8745 - Fixed Line Broadband, Security

Ah Chuck Norris, perhaps one of the greatest film and TV stars who ever lived [ED: In a parallel universe] and the only person we know who could kill a man at 50 paces with only the hair of his beard (MacGyver could probably beat that), has now been immortalised again by a new virus that attacks broadband ISP DSL routers and modems.

The Chuck Norris Virus (hehe) takes advantage of the fact that many broadband ISP routers are configured to allow remote access. It abuses this feature by randomly guessing the default admin password and thus infecting the device remotely, effectively bypassing the PC itself.

Once infected the router becomes part of a wider botnet, which can be abused by hackers to launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. It's understood that routers where the default admin password has not been changed are most vulnerable. Routers manufactured by D-Link are also known to be particularly susceptible.

The easiest solution is to set a new password for your router, which must be a hard to guess mix of largely random alphanumeric characters. It's also a good idea to disable remote access, although some ISP supplied routers may require this feature to keep your hardware up to date.

FYI: The virus gets its name because the author added this comment into its source code - "in the name of Chuck Norris".