It took 48 hours, but the mystery of the mass Asus router outage is solved
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: It took 48 hours, but the mystery of the mass Asus router outage is solved
#2Did an llm write this? I can imagine the prompt. "write a snappy sounding article about how a tech mystery got solved"
In reality, nothing is solved.
> Why were routers affected even when they had been configured to not automatically update and no manual update had been performed? Asus has yet to address this,
Why indeed
Re: It took 48 hours, but the mystery of the mass Asus router outage is solved
#3I was expecting it to be something more interesting given that it took 2 days
Re: It took 48 hours, but the mystery of the mass Asus router outage is solved
#4I was expecting it to be something more interesting given that it took 2 days
It raised a lot of interesting questions in the original thread about automatic updates and other issues that will plague us for decades to come.
And for all the talk of OpenWRT, which is a great addition to the wireless ecosystem, I'm still concerned about the staggering burden maintaining all those ports must be, and how closely the source trees are reviewed.
Just because it's open source doesn't mean it's a panacea.
Re: It took 48 hours, but the mystery of the mass Asus router outage is solved
#5If tech youtube is to be believed ASUS is quite the sinking ship at the moment, which is sad considering they have been such a cool company for many years.
Re: It took 48 hours, but the mystery of the mass Asus router outage is solved
#6Did an llm write this? I can imagine the prompt. "write a snappy sounding article about how a tech mystery got solved" In reality, nothing is solved. > Why were routers affected even when they had been configured to not automatically update and no manual update had been performed? Asus has yet to address this, Why indeed
May as well run the normal parser on an update file to print its version info and maybe some metrics in the manual update UI?
Re: It took 48 hours, but the mystery of the mass Asus router outage is solved
#7If tech youtube is to be believed ASUS is quite the sinking ship at the moment, which is sad considering they have been such a cool company for many years.
Lost their magic once they split Asus into three companies (to satisfy Apple from what I understand), thus became
Asus, Pegatron and Unihan to remove conflict of interest for their ODM side of the business
Re: It took 48 hours, but the mystery of the mass Asus router outage is solved
#8If tech youtube is to be believed ASUS is quite the sinking ship at the moment, which is sad considering they have been such a cool company for many years.
Lost their magic once they split Asus into three companies (to satisfy Apple from what I understand), thus became Asus, Pegatron and Unihan to remove conflict of interest for their ODM side of the business
Apple? How are they involved?
Re: It took 48 hours, but the mystery of the mass Asus router outage is solved
#9Did an llm write this? I can imagine the prompt. "write a snappy sounding article about how a tech mystery got solved" In reality, nothing is solved. > Why were routers affected even when they had been configured to not automatically update and no manual update had been performed? Asus has yet to address this, Why indeed
From the article:
> “On the 16th, Asus pushed a corrupted definition file for ASD, a built-in security daemon present in a wide range of their routers,” one person wrote. “As routers automatically updated and fetched the corrupted definition file, they started running out of filesystem space and memory and crashing.”
I'd say that resolves most of the overall mystery. It doesn't explain your specific question, but it certainly explains more than "nothing".
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I also think the answer to your specific question is relatively obvious, even if Asus didn't confirm it explicitly: Asus routers download new security definitions automatically, even when automatic updates are disabled. You're free to dislike that (I don't know how I feel about it), but it is clearly what's happening.
It's not like this is an uncommon practice. Windows Defender also downloads new malware definitions even when automatic Windows updates are disabled (which is hard to do, but possible on Pro editions of Windows via e.g. setting registry keys).
Re: It took 48 hours, but the mystery of the mass Asus router outage is solved
#10If tech youtube is to be believed ASUS is quite the sinking ship at the moment, which is sad considering they have been such a cool company for many years.
Lost their magic once they split Asus into three companies (to satisfy Apple from what I understand), thus became Asus, Pegatron and Unihan to remove conflict of interest for their ODM side of the business
Huh? Where can we read more?