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Orbi RBR 50 hacked - Netgear, what are you doing to protect us?
I got a suspicious email on gmail 2 weeks ago - one of those "whats up" with no message body. I don't think I even opened it, but something triggered in the msg preview and seemed to run something. ...
Thx, between coverage issues upstairs, and needing ethernet jacks for the NAS in the mezzanine area, I ended up with 3 satellites. One thing I didn't realize is that the 5G signals probably have a harder time penetrating the metal walls around the BR and that 2.4 would have been better.
Anyway I appreciate your help. But it's kind of for naught.
Yesterday the internet in our neighborhood went out and when it came back on, the RBR50 would not reboot. Steady green light but nothing would reset it. I tried all the methods I could find. Even tftp would connect and seem to upload the file but then would fail.
So I went down to B&H photo and walked out with an ASUS XT9. Setup was a breeze. I'm trying just two units and opposite ends of the apartment. We'll see if my wife notices I moved the NAS to the bedroom! She wouldn't like it much in the living room either. Setup and performance seems good so far and hopefully I can stick with just the two units. I like that both units can be routers or satellites, which gives me options in case one fails or we move.
As for whether I was hacked a few weeks ago or the router was the initial stages of the router failing, who knows. I still think it acted like a hack.
The clincher to ditching netgear was seeing how many people report bricked RBR50s as well as how many have resorted to alternate firmware. I just don't have time for all that. So in the end if I can revive the RBR, great. Otherwise I'll just put the satellites on craigslist and be done with Netgear for a while.
Thx
I can't say for certain what happened, however something was redirecting https traffic to http and if it wasn't for it being common for websites to warn you of this now, I would not have noticed this. And this was happening from other computers on my network (mac and win) including one from work that's highly locked down. Also, the fact that I could no longer log into the orbi admin screens or use the ios app are pretty strong indications of the router being hacked.
I check for updates fairly frequently in either the IOS app or the web admin screen but haven't seen any in a while. These are the versions post this incident. I don't recall if I forced an update or not when I did the hard reset. But I do use the Orbi app to check for updates often and always have. Maybe the update function itself is not that reliable? Just looking at my status screen now, why is one of the satellites running an older version yet orbi sees no update?
The isp is spectrum and I use their modem. DHCP is using that router range already. The cable connecting the modem and the RBR50 is 2' long and probably fine. Never had a problem like this before over several years.
The distance between sats and size of my home shouldn't make a difference. My apartment is about 1100ft2 but is kind of a duplex. Also there's an outdoor area but wall of the structure on the roof is clad in a metal siding, so there's a satellite just to provide more coverage there. I started with one base and one satellite but then added the satellites to solve dead spots I couldn't resolve by just moving the sats around.
Thx
FWIW, I was able to update the one satellite still running 2.7.4.24 to the latest manually by logging into the satellite directly. But I should not have had to do this if the main version check/updates worked properly.
Next time try turning OFF the other RBS and see of the one RBS that didn't get updated gets updated thru AU. Again, you may have too much wifi signal going on there thus can cause problems with AU updating to RBS correctly. If signals are noisy or poor then AU can't work well.
