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Hacking the Free "La Fonera" Wireless Router
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."
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.
First at all, it isn't called "La Fonera". "La" in Spanish is just the "The" article, making it the Fonera, a Fonera, or how you want to call it.
It is free too here in Spain, but obtaining it's a really strange scheme that looks a lot like a scam to get private info from people. For example, it was offered for free for the readers of a well known digg-like web and they recommended to use the same user and password to request it as the people had in the web page?! WTF!? And a month later they bought part of the page!!!!
Extremely strange.
And what to say of the Fonera using hidden DNS servers property of the FON makers or scripts allowing free access for them with root privileges to your private network?
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Also, the only way to access your wired network from the wireless is to allow ALL wireless users to have that access. Well, okay, you could do things like SSH out to a machine on the Internet, SSH back in, and set up port forwarding that way, but nobody would ever do that :). And your own wireless access is treated the same as everybody else's-- you have to log in every time. Annoying in combination with Firefox2's ability to resume sessions-- it loads the Fon login redirection page for every tab you had open.
They've been promising a firmware fix which would allow two SSIDs with different configurations for a long time, but last I checked it still isn't out.
The upshot of this is that I thought I would be getting a nifty solution which would let me share my access while covering my own needs. Instead I really have to run two routers, one for me, and one for everybody else. And despite the fact that I live in a pretty densely populated area, in about six months the number of people who have signed on to the Fon router, besides me, is zero. Oh, correction: the buddy who told me about Fon came by and tried to sign in with his account, which he is supposed to be able to do as a "Linus" user. That didn't work either.
In summary... it's more work and their system is not transparent or secure (oh yeah, there's no encryption on the wifi connections). It's a nifty idea, but I can't really recommend it.
An ancient Jewish proverb.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The poster is incorrect in saying this offer is only available in Germany and Austria. I noticed that the web site he pointed to was de.fon.com. I changed the "de" to an "en" and got the English version of the site — which will ship a router to a U.S. for 5 bucks.