Netgear routers found to have critical vulnerabilities within the shipped software components.

I have been a Netgear tester of several router models for years now.

The Netgear hardware is generally solid and reliable, however its the software side, in my opinion lacks attention in several key areas.

This is a totally unexpected problem, especially with the security issues being rampant today with consumer models by different companies, Netgear should look at their direct competitor ASUS with regular and persistent security updates fixes on their software networking devices.

I for one would have expected Netgear to use this fact in their favor, but instead in the end there I find more of the same sloppy and lazy implementations of the software components, this even within your current hardware on market today.

After checking the most recent GPL code for the latest high-end Netgear X8 R8500 router model (costing $400/550€), much to my surprise, I still see the same issues, something not acceptable:

OpenSSL 0.9.7f 22 March 2005 (software with 11 years and 2 months old)

OpenSSL: https://www.openssl.org/news/vulnerabilities.html

Sources:

http://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GPL/R8500-GPL_V1.0.2.54_1.0.56.zip

All Netgear routers share the same components, this seems to me a critical issue for all your current products which we as consumers buy from a well established and trusted company such as Netgear...

So my questions to Netgear are:

Where is the software development oversight?
Where is the quality control?
Where is the the customer care?

As a Netgear user I would feel betrayed and that ultimately all Netgear cares is bottom lines and not building a more reliable trust base with their customers for something that, is in essence a cost of 60 seconds per most components in order to correct some of these issues.

Discussion thread:

http://www.snbforums.com/threads/netgear-routers-found-to-have-critical-vulnerabilities-within-the-shipped-software-components.32552/

Best regards,
Hugo