alt Hacker News>42 hosts with remote management
>vender doesn’t want to fix it
Sometimes I wonder if the white hat hackers who find such a thing should just take it a step further and patch those hosts. Take the firmware, fix those bugs and update those 42 routers.
Replies
CrzyLngPwd • today at 2:22 PM
Probably simpler to brick them, forcing the owners to upgrade to a modern and supported device.
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itintheory • today at 2:43 PM
Isn't just as illegal as exploiting them for nefarious purposes? That's a pretty big risk to take to help a few dozen strangers on the Internet. What happens if your fix has an unforeseen interaction with some configuration on a remote system and your actions cause outage or worse?
binaryturtle • today at 2:47 PM
Just flash OpenWRT to them? :) (a script could prepare a matching default config)
That would be “gray hat”. It would be illegal, though it has happened in the past and to my knowledge no one has yet been prosecuted for illegally fixing vulnerabilities.
But it’s definitely not white hat.