TR Forums

I am about to return a router to my ISP, as I bought myself a better one. What do I need to do in order to ensure that no personal information was stored in its memory? I have rebooted the router to factory settings and thus deleted my personalized network settings; the statistic option has not been activated and the logs did not include any information (as the router has been shut down for a long period, as I did not have the time to take it back immediately after I replaced it).
The model is TP-Link N600 Wireless Dual Band TL-WDR3600 V 1.4.
I think that deleting my personal settings and making sure there was nothing left in statistic and logs was all (not that the latter 2 really matter that much) should be all, but I want to be sure there isn't anything I miss. I assume routers don't store actual data you have sent over the web, like passwords and stuff, right?

Generally everything the routers process is only in RAM long enough for it to be forwarded through, so a simple reboot would clear that. The only things I would expect to have in non-volatile storage would be things like your wifi password, and PPPoE login if it's a DSL unit, which a factory reset should remove.

Your measures should be fine. Routers don't store any personal information, and your ISP has already conveniently stored all of that for you.

Unless the next guy to receive the router is skilled in forensic data recovery (and wants to use your Wi-fi password for the forces of evil), I wouldn't worry too much. I'd be more concerned that your ISP won't give you credit for returning the hardware, and will attempt to charge some ridiculous fee that amounts to 5x the retail cost of the unit.

My suggestion would be to take the router to a physical location, and get a receipt for turning it in.

The Egg wrote:

My suggestion would be to take the router to a physical location, and get a receipt for turning it in.

Wise advice for returning any physical equipment to any telco/cableco/ISP.

The Egg wrote:

Unless the next guy to receive the router is skilled in forensic data recovery (and wants to use your Wi-fi password for the forces of evil), I wouldn't worry too much.

What do you mean by the bolded part? Are you implying that the Wi-Fi password can be recovered? Or is something else? Can someone recover my Techreport password from the router ?

Flatland_Spider wrote:

Your measures should be fine. Routers don't store any personal information, and your ISP has already conveniently stored all of that for you.

The ISP yes, but they are going to give the router to someone else. I had once an account on Bioware's forums broken in, so I prefer not to have a repeat of that.

I can imagine that depending on what flash filesystem was used, someone could desolder the flash chips from the router, put them in some kind of hacked up flash reader and undelete your configuration. At most this will contain your WiFi password, any PPPoE credentials for logging in on a DSL line, and which ports you forwarded i.e. what you can see through the routers configuration screens. If you are worried about this then what on earth were you doing running WiFi in the first place!

There's no storage of the data flowing through the router - that's no how a router works anyway, but even if they did then they just don't have the room.

The Egg wrote:

My suggestion would be to take the router to a physical location, and get a receipt for turning it in.

That's what I did when I returned my rental modem. I hit the reset button to clear out any old settings that would be in there, and then I showed up with the modem at the Comcast store and said I had bought my own modem.

They scanned the barcode on the back, asked if I was me, and took care of the rest of it from there.

notfred wrote:

There's no storage of the data flowing through the router - that's no how a router works anyway, but even if they did then they just don't have the room.

Generally, yeah. Though apparently some enterprise printers were caught storing everything scanned/copied on an internal hard drive, so it's not too crazy of an idea... (Seriously, who uses printer hard drives for the same forms you frequently print anyway? I thought everyone went back to their PC and printed from there when needed.)

localhostrulez wrote:

notfred wrote:

There's no storage of the data flowing through the router - that's no how a router works anyway, but even if they did then they just don't have the room.

Generally, yeah. Though apparently some enterprise printers were caught storing everything scanned/copied on an internal hard drive, so it's not too crazy of an idea... (Seriously, who uses printer hard drives for the same forms you frequently print anyway? I thought everyone went back to their PC and printed from there when needed.)

They weren't spying. The copiers were using the hard drive as a buffer for scanned data (try holding a 200 page scan in RAM on a device that has maybe 128MB) and were just lazy about cleaning up old data. IIRC the real lesson from that story was yes, copiers have hard drives, and yes they should be securely destroyed like any other hard drive in a corporate environment.

Yup, that's enterprise all-in-one printer/scanner/copiers, not routers. They work in very different ways inside.

For a modem I don't think it matters, but for routers just snag a paperclip and press the physical reset button to wipe its settings, which it sounds like you've already done.

And as The Egg says, make sure your ISP gives you a receipt for returning it. TWC and Comcast are especially bad about billing you for them AFTER you've already turned them in... whether deliberate or simply due to utterly incompetent people manning the desks you have to wait 30 minutes to reach, I'm not sure.

Kougar wrote:

For a modem I don't think it matters, but for routers just snag a paperclip and press the physical reset button to wipe its settings, which it sounds like you've already done.

And as The Egg says, make sure your ISP gives you a receipt for returning it. TWC and Comcast are especially bad about billing you for them AFTER you've already turned them in... whether deliberate or simply due to utterly incompetent people manning the desks you have to wait 30 minutes to reach, I'm not sure.

Ok, thanks for the replies, I have done all that.