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Netgear's Amusing "fix" for WG602v1 Backdoor

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the get-your-giggle-on dept.

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'. "

4 of 515 comments (clear)

  1. Re:anon to not karma whore by Mz6 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    yeah.. my fault :)

    --
    Hmmm.
  2. Re:Not funny at all by Albanach · · Score: 1, Offtopic
    Instead of spending time consulting lawyers, why don't the lusers instead spend time reading the accompanying manual which tells them to select their own password.

    Why do people want to blame, sue and hold responsible a company for the actions of users who have chosen either not to read or not to follow the doccumentation.

    I'm not trolling here, I agree that these things should be shipped so they won't fnction until a password is chosen by the user. Nonetheless, the users were told to set a password and ignored that advice, now the company that provided the hardware is supposed to be responsible for their ignorance?

  3. Linksys is just as bad by MudflapSoftware · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I have an older linksys BEFWS11 (4 port 10/100 switch, 802.11b, internet router/firewall). I was having terrible issues getting *any* of my pcmcia and pci wireless cards to talk to this device. I was also having problems my custom settings getting reset to factory defaults, etc. Calling tech support was useless. They recommended that i *downgrade* to an earlier version of the firmware, which was known to contain a large number of security vulnerabilities. That wasn't gonna happen. They also thought that I might want to send the unit in for testing and possible repair. Of course the warranty on the unit expired about a month earlier. So, after purchasing a cheapo blitzz wireless internet router @ walmart for $40 (which works flawlessly I might add), I noticed that linksys had updated the firmware. I installed the newest version, and whammo they fixed the wireless problem..... by disabling the wireless tranceiver entirely. Another call to linksys tech support was fruitless, as they recommended that I just go and buy a WRT54G.

  4. Re:Nice fix.HEY! Don't knock it!! Its stable by lcsjk · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Don't talk bad about Win-95. I have an old machine with a Hayes 56k external. The computer runs Win95 loaded from about 12 floppy disks and has never been patched. I don't try to load the latest software or do any updates/upgrades except the virus and firewall.
    It never, never, never crashes or has a problem of any kind. (Well, it will crash if I run Netscape and ACDSee and Photoshop at the same time - so I don't.) I use it for all my "emergency" needs when my new fast gee whizz tiger will not run a program I need.
    I often wonder what MS could have done if they had fixed the few problems in W-95 had instead of making everyone pay more and more for upgraded bloatware>