Hacking the Free "La Fonera" Wireless Router

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Sunday November 5, 2006 @08:45AM from the wisdom-of-crowds dept.

wertarbyte writes, "FON is still giving away their wireless routers for free in Germany and Austria until Wednesday — under the premise that the devices will be connected and used as FON access points. The router, called 'La Fonera,' is a variant of OpenWRT, but locked down to prevent modification, including a signed firmware image to prevent the upload of new software. It is, however, possible to get shell access by connecting to a serial port present on the circuit board. And now two students from Germany have discovered vulnerabilities in the CGI scripts used to configure the device, and successfully activated an SSH daemon on the device by exploiting them, giving owners a root shell on their router. They also provide a detailed description of the procedure and 'ready-to-use' perl scripts to open up your router."

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Whats so great about this? by gad_zuki! · 2006-11-05 08:54 · Score: 4, Insightful

Its a violation of a pretty neat little system. These things are free (or about as close you can get to it) so its not like its some propriety item they bought and are trying to get more features out of. They are defrauding a company for free wireless routers.

Maybe Im crazy but I think the FON system is very clever and if peope werent abusing it, it might take off interesting ways. Instead it "doodzz free wireless routers here!!!" Shame really.