Does it seem like you are getting NETGEAR security advisories and firmware updates much more frequently? Is this a sign of trouble? What's going on at NETGEAR?
If it seems like you are getting more security advisories from NETGEAR, you probably are. Several years ago we saw how threats to your network and our products were increasing. Today, I am sure you see a new story on security vulnerabilities break every week.
At that time we launched numerous programs across the company to address these issues head on. We hired security experts in all of our business units, we enlisted outside firms to test how secure our products are, we teamed up with Bugcrowd to incent ongoing hacking by independent consultants(see NETGEAR Cash Rewards), just to name a few of our initiatives.
This new level of scrutiny for all of our products is findings issues before you (or the bad guys) do. The vast majority of these issue are either minor risks (extremely difficult to exploit) or they represent ease-of-use enhancements. We don't ignore any of the issues we find or that are brought to our attention but we do consider our customers very carefully when we decide how to handle each issue.
In the case of a serious vulnerability which we feel our customers might be susceptible to, we will immediately patch the defective code and send alerts to all of the customers who have registered that product. Part of our security initiative is to STRONGLY encourage our customers to register all of their NETGEAR products so that we can make you aware of any issues which our ongoing efforts uncover.
Our new Insight App (which you can get for your smart phone off of the Apple app store or Playstore for Android), allows you to set up a secure personal account using your email address and register all of your NETGEAR products on-line. This Insight App allows you to scan the barcode on the NETGEAR product and enters the data directly into our customer support database, so we can email you with anything important which might come up on one of your products.
If we find a security issue where the risk is minimal or the side-effect is minor, we might bring several fixes together into a single more comprehensive update. We will do this whenever justified to save on the number of emailings which we are sending to our customer. We know that they can be irritating but we will err on the side of caution.
We know this is a serious issue to you and we are taking the security of your NETGEAR products very seriously as well. If you think you have found a security vulnerability in one of our products you can report it to the Bugcrowd link above or if you can contact NETGEAR directly at email: techsupport.security@netgear.com
