During his keynote and a press conference that followed here at the Black Hat information security conference, In-Q-Tel Chief Information Security Officer Dan Geer expressed concern about the growing threat of botnets powered by home and small office routers. The inexpensive Wi-Fi routers commonly used for home Internet access—which are rarely patched by their owners—are an easy target for hackers, Geer said, and could be used to construct a botnet that “could probably take down the Internet.” Asked by Ars if he considered home routers to be the equivalent of critical infrastructure as a security priority, he answered in the affirmative. Geer spoke about the threat posed by home routers in advance of “SOHOpelessly Broken,” a router hacking contest scheduled for the DEF CON security conference later this week sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.