Virgin Media PLC is a British company which provides fixed and mobile telephone, television and broadband internet services to businesses and consumers in the United Kingdom.
Earlier today they warned 800k customers to change their default wifi (wpa2) passwords, as their default random algorithm for generating passwords that come with the home routers are weak to attacks.
The passwords consist of A-Z with 2 missing letters and all lowercase. Due to the limited about of combinations needed to compare a successful hash, it was found that hackers could gain access to the network and all the protected devices in under 4 days.
Once a hacker gains access to a network, they can perform a man in the middle attack and force the clients to send their information to them instead of the router. They can also gain access to appliances and ioT devices alike.
Due to the high performance of gpu hash cracking and increasing technology; such attacks can perform much faster than a few years ago. Combined with a wordlist generator such as crunch, hackers can obtain every password the company generated. This makes it a 100% successful rate if time and computation rate are not accounted for.
Pass phrases is highly suggested as the time it would take even with tons of computation power would make it not worthwhile.
ThisIsAsecurePassphraseExample