Wisconsin Uni page describes Netgear "flawed routers"

According to the page, Wisconsin was hit by a flood of 100s of thousands of packets per second, not caused by a malicious denial of service attack, but by what the page claims is a "serious flaw" in the design of low cost Internet products.

The page says that Wisconsin University is now engaged in a conversation with Netgear consisting of 15 different individuals from vendor and from the academy.

The problem, it claims, is that there's a flawed Netgear SNTP client implementation. Netgear is also producing firmware that doesn't have such problems, it appears.

The author of the page claims that 500,000 unique Netgear sources queried the Wisconsin time server in just one day, while Netgear said that 707,147 of its products that might be affected by the problem had been manufactured, the page claims.

There's more here.

There's confirmation of some of these problems at this Netgear support page for the RP614, here, which points out that some products use public NTP sources that can cause "spikes", and gives a firmware fix for a series of products. µ