NetGear Also Has Remote Access Wide Open

Glenn Fleishman writes "On the heels of Linksys's WRT54G problem of not allowing remote access to be disabled in certain cases and firmware, BugTraq published this report that NetGear's WG602 access point has a hidden password that provides remote and local administrative control. Unlike Linksys's, where turning the firewall on (which is on by default, but a researcher found new units in which it was off when taken out of the box), the NetGear hole cannot be disabled. The backdoor seems to have been created by the vendor that packaged the device for NetGear."

Comments

Fixed in new firmware, available here:

[Anonymous Coward]

http://kbserver.netgear.com/support_details.asp?dn ldID=735

Re:Fixed in new firmware, available here:

[Chucky B. Bear]

I've just upgraded to the latest firmware. It is NOT FIXED!!!! They have simply gone and changed the username and password to something else. There is STILL a default superuser account with password.

(You can find it yourselve by just taking similiar steps as in the securityfoces article.)

Re:huh?

[RidiculousPie]

This vulnerability can be exploited by any person which is able to reach the webinterface of the device with a webbrowser.

It would appear that if the webinterface is disabled, the device cannot be compromised.

Re:One wonders what the internal policies are ...

[BigHungryJoe]

Everyone but the vendors knows it's a bad idea. Cisco recently made the same mistake.

Netgear WG302

[the eric conspiracy]

Well. at least this username/password doesn't work with a WG302 with firmware 1.5.

linked properly for the lazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Netgear Firmware Upgrade

WGR614

[Rinisari]

NetGear WGR614 is not affected by this bug. I'm going to try to get its firmware and follow the same procedure listed in that Bugtraq report to see what I can find.

Re:Possibilities.

[alexatrit]

I stand corrected, here.

"The only way to clear the BIOS password is with a Master Reset Password provided by Dell for that Model No. and they will not give you the master unless you can give them the name. address and telephone of the registered owner. However the password is universal for all laps with the same model no., so if you know someone who is a registered owner, you can call Dell and get the master."

Reference here. That being said, the master for an Inspiron 5000 is BLVJCH. Booyah!

It's a feature, not a bug.

[gumpish]

The URL is "mangled" for people browsing with mobile devices. The space is added so tiny displays can word wrap the text. (And also so crapflooders can't make your horizontal scroll bar appear.)

Personally I think the number of people using such browsers is probably so small that there is no justification for this "feature", but since Slashdot isn't likely to change, URLs should be submitted as proper links and not just plan text.

Take my advice

[Q2Serpent]

I know this is a huge problem for the general public, but for those of us with a linux machine, do what I do and save yourself some trouble: put two network cards in the linux machine. Connect one to the internet and the other to your wireless router's normal ethernet ports (don't use the port that is supposed to be for the internet). Then, just set up your linux firewall/NAT, and you get all the benefits of wireless and a wired hub on the inside, with a linux machine doing the routing/firewalling for security from the outside. Since the router isn't on the net, no one can even touch it.

WG602v2 with firmware 2.0rc5

[thewiz]

Just checked my WG602v2 and the factory firmware upgrade 2.0rc5 and they do not have the backdoor.

Whew!

Re:How very timely...

[Homology]

I was going to buy a Netgear wireless access point/router this week.

If 11Mbps is sufficient for your needs, you could by a 802.11b wireless card that uses the Prism 2.5 chipset. This chipset can function in hostAP mode. At home I use Netgear MA311 in an older Dell functioning as my wireless access point, internet gateway and firewall. Instead of WEP, I use IPSec, and only authorized IPSec traffic is allowed (and thus no leaching from my Kazaa loving neighbour).

You might need to flash the firmware, though, which you can find here.

If you want a secure, easy and hassle free gateway, just install OpenBSD.

Re:Good grief...

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Look into Smoothwall. I'm using it on an old PPro 200 as a firewall/router. It supports 3 networks at the moment (red/external, Green/internal, Orange/restricted (wlan for instance). I have an older netgear router that I keep as a spare (the old PPro 200 has to die sometime...), but even with that, the Smoothwall config can be dumped to floppy and moved to a completely different machine easily.

The Linksys problem was a false report

[lseltzer]

Even the guy who reported it has admitted it and Linksys issued a statement.

Re:The problem of convinience

[Harodotus]

Smoothwall is exactly that, a custom Linux distro with boot-from-cd install that only requires you to hit "enter" a couple dozen times to turn any old 2 nic pc into a pre-configured modern firewall with internal NAT and DHCP.

I use it and find it very handy (lots of old PC hardware about)