Does your Internet Service Provider keep firmware on their devices up to date? Mine does not.

If you live in Australia, then I’m interested to hear whether your Internet Service Provider ensures that the internet gateway device that they have provided to you is kept up to date with the latest firmware. This is very important to ensure security for your home and/or business - see my previous post for the reasons.

Turns out that my ISP (Exetel) does not. I submitted an issue to Exetel’s support team to ask why. Exetel do have all gateway devices configured so that they are remotely managed (using TR-069), and they offered to remotely upgrade my gateway with the latest firmware. I said, please go ahead if you can schedule during the middle of the night. They were unable to schedule it for quiet hours, so with us working from home and hence heavily reliant on the internet during the day, I said I would have to perform the upgrade myself at a convenient time. I continued pursuing it with them, pointing out that I didn’t feel that customers should have to be responsible for somehow knowing when new firmware becomes available, and instigating the upgrade myself (either via request or performing the upgrade myself). I have the technical knowledge to know how, but most retail customers wouldn’t even be aware of this issue, let alone know how to figure out if and when their gateway’s firmware is out of date. They eventually acknowledged it was an issue, and said that they were still working on implementing a process to keep all their customers gateways up-to-date (exact words were “the bulk process is still in the progress and not yet fully completed").

Like most Australians now, my internet is provided by our monopoly wholesaler NBNCo, so I have a cable modem from NBNCo plus a gateway from my Internet Retail Service Provider (RSP), i.e. Exetel. FYI Exetel confirmed that NBNCo keeps their modem up-to-date with firmware.

I would be interested to hear which Retail Service Providers, if any, ensure their gateway devices are kept up to date. Please respond and share if you know the situation with your own RSP. If you don’t know, then it’s worth your while finding out, because this is important to maintaining security of your home or business. If I get enough responses then we may end up with a list that can be shared, which could be helpful for people deciding who which RSP to choose, and maybe even shine a spotlight and put pressure RSPs on this important issue.

#cybersecurity #cyber #smallbusiness #smallbusinesssucess