A few days ago, some friends of mine noticed that the SSID on their
wireless netgear changed from "Netgear" to "0wned". Since they "just
plugged it in", I figured that some kids just got in and changed the
default passwords to something else.
I first reset the wireless router to see what it would do, and sure
enough, the "0nwed" SSID was gone. I then plugged a laptop in directly
and set it to DHCP. When I ran ipoconfig /all to see what IP I got, I
got a public 71.x.y.z IP. I thought this was odd, so I tried to do a
hard reset to the factory defaults. Nothing. I called Netgear's tech
support to make sure that I was resetting it right, and they said that I
was and that it was definitely a "hardware problem" (I didn't tell them
that it was 0wned for fear of them not supporting it).
Might they have uploaded some hacked GPL firmware (a la Sveasoft)? I
can't for the life of me get this back to its original settings.
Because I can't talk directly to it (e.g. hitting 192.168.0.1 from my
browser) I suspect that they've somehow put the Netgear in some sort of
bridge mode. I've done this on Netopias for small businesses when I've
wanted to firewall and route on a PIX, but have never had this problem
on a Netgear.
Any ideas? Netgear says that they'll RMA it, but I'm really curious as
to what these yahoos might have done.
