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Re: [LUG] Netgear Router

 

"maybe someone else will chime with a balancing opinion and tell you that I'm 
overstating it," if only you were!!!

I can only, sorrowfully, confirm that most ISP supply cheap, cr*p quality routers. 
I've just moved to EE Broadband and their BrightBox 1 is, in my opinion, the worst 
I've ever encountered. And after a lifetime as a Network and Security Engineer I've 
seen some garbage.

It's the usual story, you mostly get what you pay for. If you can afford the cost, 
time and effort to buy and support one, I'd buy a Juniper router, or maybe a Cisco, 
both professional, commercial quality routers that will do anything you could ever 
want.

Coming down-market, I've had a couple of Draytek routers, latest was a Vigor 2830n, 
does wifi and a lot of quality features well, but was well over Â100 at the time.

Netgear do some fairly good quality ones at their dearer end, but, as with ALL the 
above equipment, you MUST stay on top of the patches and firmware upgrades, and keep 
the config similarly relevantly configured. (You patch your platforms and PC's don't 
you?)

There are just too many exploits, vulnerabilities, and holes being discovered all 
the time not to keep your router up to date. And the shabby shameful grossly naÃve 
quality of the host of software engineers out there are to blame. Combine that with 
the fact that the ISP business is so cut-throat now that they can't/won't afford 
decent hardware for their users and you begin to understand why there are so many 
problems.

I think that covers it.


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-----Original Message-----
From: list [mailto:list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of mr meowski
Sent: 10 November 2017 16:03
To: list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [LUG] Netgear Router

On 10/11/17 08:50, Neil wrote:

> Well, I have certainly opened a can of worms here. I will have a read 
> through the above, thanks. And I must decide what to do next. Some 
> SOHO routers are very pricey, and yet you tell me they are all a load 
> of rubbish. That does not make things easy. At least my desktop does 
> not use wifi. This has all made me feel very worried about the whole 
> shebang. It seems that, even if I had remembered the password, it is 
> all just a mess anyway.
> 
> Will follow up with all this later

Definitely just start here - all the instructions you need are on the one page and 
it's pretty trivial to setup and test:

https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/netgear/telnet.console

On your older router model + firmware you should be able to access the "hidden" 
backdoor admin access "feature" that Netgear so kindly left for you. With that you 
can recover/change passwords, dump configs and rather amusingly, actually fix the 
hole itself using the exploit :|

Apologies for inducing yet more existential angst about the big scary internet - 
maybe someone else will chime with a balancing opinion and tell you that I'm 
overstating it, the internet is secure, corporations and governments have your back 
and care for you and there's bound to be an accidental little flaw in software here 
and there so there's nothing to worry about.

Anyone?

Cheers
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