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Netgear's Amusing "fix" for WG602v1 Backdoor
An anonymous reader writes "Recently Slashdot reported that the Netgear router has as WLAN backdoor. According to this report by the news service of the German publisher Heise Netgear "fixed" the problem with a firmware update. And what is the fix? According to Heise, they didn't remove the backdoor at all. Instead they just changed the login information! They replaced the old user name 'super' with 'superman', and changed the old password to '21241036'. "
Why are companies allowed to get away with this crap just because we pay them for their shoddy wares?
Any open source coder would be summarily flogged for such a transgression. Why on EARTH is this not literally considered a criminal offense for a company to do?
And I for one used to hold Netgear in reasonably high regard, too.
Never again.
And then one day you find, ten years have gone behind you....
Unfortunately Heise (publisher of c't and iX) is the probably most clueful German publishing house when it comes to technology.
Those Netgear bozos really seem to be dumber then my cigar cutter.
The other explanation is that the equipment has such a fundamental design flaw that it can't be fixed at all. But then they act damn unresponsible.
Then again: Thanks to such blunders I know what equipment not to buy.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
>Why are companies allowed to get away with this crap just because we pay them for their shoddy wares?
.016 euro
The answer lies within the question: Because we pay them.
If someone paid you to paint a building and didn't care whether you stripped off the old paint first, I guarantee you you would just slap a coat over the old paint.
>And I for one used to hold Netgear in reasonably high regard, too.
Your mistake, then.
>Never again.
You should not say never if you want to reach them. This just makes the company execs think that since they can never reach you as a customer again, they won't make the effort. What you should say instead is: "I will purchase products from other companies since theirs do not address my needs at this time."
This is reasonable to them, and they won't discount you as a hot-head but rather may take your advice.
Just my
"Piter, too, is dead."
Well, it seems pretty obvious to me... it's supposed to be there.
This shows that it was Netgear's intention to purposely put back doors into the product. The reason "why" is not really evident. I can leave that up to the tinfoil hat crowd.
That's crap. There may be a multitude of reasons why they couldn't remove the backdoor (no access to source code, the guy who wrote it was on holiday, whatever...) but they could have at least changed the password with a hex editor to something that was difficult to type from a keyboard, low-ascii values for example.
Your last line says it all - they should be held accountable. If it's advertised as being secure, and a backdoor is found, they should have to buy back every single unit or replace every single unit with a working one.
If anyone has been damaged by the availability of the back door they should be held liable even if they claim you waive that right in their license agreement (their license agreement does not state there may be the possibility of back doors, no?)
If you claim something is secure, but that you can't prevent all future attacks so you can't be liable, that's one thing, but when the liability is clearly your fault, it's another.
Stupid sexy Flanders.