I finally got my Dsl Router yesterday, the crappy Thomson router, which is locked to my ISP. I tried calling them, and they gave me a secondary username to the router, but my router kept crashing and i kept asking them to provide me with a new user, until the technical support guy went mad, and tried to bully me. So I gave up, and accepted the fact that this crappy support is in charge of my internet security.

Two years ago, i wrote a post named “How to hack Thomson and DLink routers key ?+ how to protect your router from getting hacked ?” Apparently the encryption algorithm “Thomson/SpeedTouch”, got leaked. And hackers made tools available for people, so they can know the default passwords that come with any DSL router.

I thought that after 3 years of the algorithm leak, and 2 years of writing my post about how unsecured Thomson routers are, the Lebanese ISPs would be responsible enough to actually fix the issue.

Instead, while surfing the net, my internet got slow out of the sudden, so I disconnected all my other devices, so I can find the problem. And although i had all my programs blocked by my firewall, pinging Google ( using cmd ping google -t) got me very high responses.

Since My Internet provider had locked me out of administrating my router, I installed “Angry Ip scanner”, and found out that another machine was using my connection. I turned off WiFi on the router, and plugged a cable from the crappy Thomson router to a LinkSys router, and the ping was back normal.

Which left me to the conclusion that my router was hacked, using either a default password generator like the ones i posted about (like this online tool) which has the default password of my thomson router on it. Or by a technology called WPS cracker.

Sadly for years now, our Lebanese internet providers have been providing us, with stupid hackable routers, without changing the default password, or informing us that we might be hacked. The issue is not only that the service you legally bought is being robbed, intruders can intercept your traffic and get all of your internet usage, whatsapp messages, and even get into your computer, to steal your data.

Having that said, we found our self with two conclusions:

If our internet providers are not aware of this problem, they have some really stupid technical teams.

And if they are aware of this problem, they are robbing us. Specially that the majority of Dsl users are not tech geeks like me, and they will never know that they’re being hacked. I imagine most of them blaming the kids, for exceeding the quota.

So what are you going to do about this Lebanon?

Note: Lebanese ISPs providing Thomson routers : Sodetel, terranet, IDM and Ogero.( tell me please if other internet providers are also using this router)