IT Masala

"FON is still giving away their wireless routers for free in Germany and Austria until Wednesday — under the premise that the devices will be connected and used as FON access points.

The router, called 'La Fonera,' is a variant of OpenWRT, but locked down to prevent modification, including a signed firmware image to prevent the upload of new software. It is, however, possible to get shell access by connecting to a serial port present on the circuit board.

And now two students from Germany have discovered vulnerabilities in the CGI scripts used to configure the device, and successfully activated an SSH daemon on the device by exploiting them, giving owners a root shell on their router. They also provide a detailed description of the procedure and 'ready-to-use' perl scripts to open up your router."