Pirater’s Blog

At Pirater’s Blog, we love all things hacked and modded. Today, I would like to introduce you to hacked router firmwares and what it can do for you. This is completely legal and safe (ish)–I say this because installing non-supported software will void manufacturer warranty. However, if you have an old router lying around or you just feel like living life on the edge (LOL, not), this guide will introduce you briefly about the possibilities and also available options when it comes to hacking your router.

So why would you want to risk voiding warranty and do such a thing? Well, third party firmwares offers more options than the original software provided by the manufacturer. For one, you have the ability to adjust wifi signal–a nice feature for anyone looking to get better connectivity around the house without spending more money on a new router or buying booster antenna. Another, is the extensive control over bandwidth. With all of these 3rd-party firmwares, you are provided with a far superior QoS manager than the one provided by the manufacturer’s firmware. This allows the user to create extensive rules to allocate bandwidth appropriately for certain services, like bittorrent, or gaming. Overall, these 3rd-party firmwares add flexibility and provide more tools at your disposal to manage your internet.

There are many 3rd-party providers to pick from (DD-wrt, HyperWRT, Sveasoft’s Alchemy ($20 annual membership), Tomato, and variants. Out of all of these, DD-wrt is perhaps one of the most popular, offering a plethora of features, and supports an extensive list of brands. With DD-wrt, you get features like Chillspot, IPv6, OpenVPN, SSH, better UPnP support, MMC/SD Cards (hardware modding necessary), VOIP, and so on. For the sake of simplicity, well, more like I’m too lazy to write a guide for each firmware; I will stick to DD-wrt.

The howto…

Getting these firmware on your router is extremely simple. To get started, you need to see if your device is supported by one of these firmwares. DD-wrt provides a list for you to check. Once you have confirmed that your device is supported, you need to download the appropriate firmware version.

IMPORTANT: (You need to be connected physically to the router, wireless connection will not work and will brick your router).

1. Find your Default Gateway address to access the firmware. (Windows users use ipconfig /all in the command prompt, linux and mac users can use ifconfig -a in the terminal).

2. Open your browser and point to the Gateway address (i.e. 192.168.1.1) and enter the username and password. Unless you have changed it, refer to the manual or manufacturer’s website for the default access information.

3. Go into the firmware upgrade option. For most routers, it will be under the Administration menu; such a case applies to Linksys routers. Some router will have its own menu. It should not be hard to locate. Once you do, hit Browse… and point to the firmware file (*.bin) you had extracted from the archive and proceed with the upgrade. It usually take about 5 minutes to do the upgrade. (NEVER CLOSE YOUR BROWSER OR INTERRUPT THE CONNECTION AT THIS TIME). If something went wrong with the upgrade, linksysinfo is the best place to get some help on how to unbrick the router.

Once upgraded, point your browser to 192.168.1.1, as this is the Gateway address used by DD-wrt. The default login information is username: root // password: admin.

The initial setup…

1. Go to Basic and setup your internet account information. If you are using cable or have internet that doesn’t require a login then skip this part. However, if your internet uses PPPoE, then you will have to enter your login information. To this, inside the Basic tab, select the connection type from automatic to PPoE, input your user name and password and hit save.

Increase WiFI signal…

To increase your signal, select Wireless from the menu tab, then click on Advanced Settings, then find Xmit Power. DD-Wrt recommends 70. However, you can change to whatever is suited for you. Remember that if you increase the signal over 70, more stress will be put on the router and this may potentially decrease the life of the router.

Automatically block unwanted ads websites and ad trackers…

Double-click and other websites are advertisement companies. By blocking these you can get rid of most of the garbage on your screen and also minimize your chance of contracting adwares and malwares. To do this you need to create a startup script. Follow this guide to get started. Inside the startup script you need to paste this code:

logger WAN UP Script Executing
sleep 5
test -s /tmp/dlhosts
if [ $? == 1 ] ; then
    echo -e “#!/bin/sh\nwget -O - http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt | grep 127.0.0.1 | sed -e ‘2,\$s/127.0.0.1/0.0.0.0/g’ -e ’s/[[:space:]]*#.*$//’ > /etc/hosts\nlogger DOWNLOADED http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt\nkillall -1 dnsmasq” > /tmp/dlhosts
    chmod 777 /tmp/dlhosts
    /tmp/dlhosts
fi
cru a Gethosts “45 23 * * 5 /tmp/dlhosts”

This tells the router to automatically download a list of known adtrackers and malware sites and redirects any client request of these sites to 127.0.0.1, which effectively blocks them from being accessed on your network. A thread regarding this script, which contains the code used above can be found in the linksysinfo forum (link).