Refurbished Routers - some issues

[paulsiu]

I purchased two ASUS router from New Egg recently. The first one arrive with everything reset to factory. The second one however appears to have a post it note of the password. I had the password changed, but shouldn't the refurbished unit had a factory reset of some sort. What if the previous owner load up some sort of custom firmware with malware?

Paul

 

[L&LD]

Simple; just load the firmware you want and reset to factory defaults.

 

[Trip]

Once you have your desired firmware downloaded and saved, follow the specific steps to put your model of Asus into recovery mode (usually by holding down the reset button with the unit powered off, then powering it on and waiting roughly 5-10 seconds before releasing the reset button, whereby the power light should have started slowly blinking) then wire into one of the router's LAN ports, browse to the router's default IP with a web browser (should be 192.168.1.1) whereby you should be greeted by a simple webpage with the title "ASUS - CFE miniWeb Server" and a "Choose File" button allowing you to select and upload the firmware file you saved earlier. Select the file, hit the "Upload" button, and wait for a full FIVE minutes before touching anything -- DO NOT INTERRUPT THAT PROCESS. Once the 5 minutes is up, try to refresh the browser screen and you should be greeted by a restored full login page for the firmware of choice.