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It took 48 hours, but the mystery of the mass Asus router outage is solved
- igor47 3y agoDid an llm write this? I can imagine the prompt. "write a snappy sounding article about how a tech mystery got solved" In reality, nothing is solved. > Why were routers affected even when they had been configured to not automatically update and no manual update had been performed? Asus has yet to address this, Why indeed
- Nullabillity 3y agoThe malware signature db is presumably updated separately from the firmware image, since they're on completely different release cadences. My ASUS router with the malware filter disabled wasn't affected, FWIW.
- roundandround 3y agoMay as well run the normal parser on an update file to print its version info and maybe some metrics in the manual update UI?
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoFrom the article: > “On the 16th, Asus pushed a corrupted definition file for ASD, a built-in security daemon present in a wide range of their routers,” one person wrote. “As routers automatically updated and fetched the corrupted definition file, they started running out of filesystem space and memory and crashing.” I'd say that resolves most of the overall mystery. It doesn't explain your specific question, but it certainly explains more than "nothing". --- I also think the answer to your specific question is relatively obvious, even if Asus didn't confirm it explicitly: Asus routers download new security definitions automatically, even when automatic updates are disabled. You're free to dislike that (I don't know how I feel about it), but it is clearly what's happening. It's not like this is an uncommon practice. Windows Defender also downloads new malware definitions even when automatic Windows updates are disabled (which is hard to do, but possible on Pro editions of Windows via e.g. setting registry keys).
- bagacrap 3y agoI was expecting it to be something more interesting given that it took 2 days
- jgerrish 3y agoIt raised a lot of interesting questions in the original thread about automatic updates and other issues that will plague us for decades to come. And for all the talk of OpenWRT, which is a great addition to the wireless ecosystem, I'm still concerned about the staggering burden maintaining all those ports must be, and how closely the source trees are reviewed. Just because it's open source doesn't mean it's a panacea.
- omgmajk 3y agoIf tech youtube is to be believed ASUS is quite the sinking ship at the moment, which is sad considering they have been such a cool company for many years.
- thevagrant 3y agoLost their magic once they split Asus into three companies (to satisfy Apple from what I understand), thus became Asus, Pegatron and Unihan to remove conflict of interest for their ODM side of the business
- flangola7 3y agoApple? How are they involved?
- thevagrant 3y agoAsus was very successful and at one point had captured a large portion of the motherboard market due to their extremely reliable motherboards at that time. (I recall reading many years ago as many as 1 in 4 computers were using an Asus mobo). Asus started to branch into making other equipment. Their notebooks were good quality and their premium notebooks were innovative and risked eating into markets of other manufacturers. Complaints were raised that Asus had a conflict of interest as they were an ODM making equipment for companies like Apple but then able to leverage that to assist their own business. Asus was then split to remove conflict of interests.
- harel 3y agoDid this affect routers with the Merlin version of installed? I don't run stock asus on my routers and had no such incident.