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

The problem of convinience

[luvirini]

This is a general problem when you buy ready made solutions in the form of "boxes" , you cannot be fully sure of anything inside so it is basically a question of trust.

For example firewalls:

Question 1: how do you know the box firewall you bought is secure and no backdoors?

Answer: normally you do not.

Question 2: Why do majority ofpeople buy those instead of making their own?

Answer: Because it is a lot more convinient

So instead of spending time to build something, most people want to just get something that works and thus have to just trust the vendors, as they do not have the skill/time/inclanation/will etc to do it themselves.