A Ton of Popular Netgear Routers Are Exposed—With No Easy Fix

A vulnerability in some popular Netgear routers has gone unpatched for months. Left unchecked, it leaves thousands of home networking devices exposed to full control by hackers, who can then ensnare them in havoc-wreaking botnets. While Netgear has finally released a tentative fix for some models, the delays and challenges in patching all of them help illustrate just how at risk the Internet of Things is—and how hard it is to patch up when things go wrong.