Netgear 0-day vulnerability analysis and exploit

It's another reason once you bought a router to reflash it with alternative firmwares as OpenWRT or DD-WRT

Routers have been full of stupidly bad bugs for years; nothing really new here. I recall analyzing one a while back and finding that it used session tokens to determine whether one was logged into the interface. These were derived from the uptime with triple des, but the nonce was a constant string of text and the key was based off of interface mac addresses. One has to wonder, at that point, why do anything at all?

The worst part is this isn't even just going to affect folks that would never think to update their router firmware. The firmware they do push out is frequently a massive downgrade.

About a year ago, I tried to update the firmware on my Netgear router. It was the exact model from the article, the R7000. I assumed "new update" for router firmware would involve some critical security updates, and maybe some stability fixes, but it basically rendered the router unusable. It would crash every few hours with normal usage. I googled around and turns out it was a known issue, the only recommended fix was "roll back to version x.x.x (2 versions prior). I found this fix months after it had been posted, and there had still been no new patch released to fix the issue.

When my relatives call me to fix their wifi, I now have to think twice about updating the firmware. These days I recommend the google wifi mesh router(s), because they just involve the least maintenance effort. They have less fine-tune controls and the wifi speed is slightly slower when you start approaching gigabit speeds (vs other high-end consumer routers), but it's definitely worth the trade off for me. Plus, anyone calling me to help with their wifi won't notice either of those things :)

Highly recommend the synology line of routers. I've deployed a few of them for neighbors and have gotten exactly 0 calls. They mesh over wired or wireless, and for all of their faults Synology does a pretty good job of releasing software updates for their products for WAY longer than any other vendor I've worked with.

Just make sure you use the 2600AC as the primary router, the 2200s can technically function in that role but are pretty under-powered.

Reading stuff like this makes me glad I ditched consumer grade all-in-one stuff and went with a $REAL (feel free to substitute appropriate brand) router and stand alone AP.