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Netgear Nighthawk RS700S: Red Team Level1Diagnostic
Level1Techs
L1 Articles & Video-related
level1diagnostic
wendell
May 24, 2026, 8:08pm
Preview of the Netgear RS700S.
I would also submit that Netgear deleting ALL the GPL links:
NETGEAR Open Source Code for Programmers (GPL)
… they know how bad it is.
hmm, that’s concerning.
image498×369 53.6 KB
so uh hey you got my code gpl says you owe me?
Netgear Nighthawk RS700S (BE19000) — Software Inventory & CVE Exposure
Target: LAN IP of the RS700S (subnet gateway)
Date of audit: 2026-05-24
Access method: HTTPS web UI (admin credentials), debug log download via Debug_log.zip, and live nmap probing from the LAN side
Auditor: read-only enumeration from the LAN side; no exploits run
0. Executive summary
The RS700S is a modern WiFi 7 Broadcom BCM4916-based router running firmware V1.0.11.6 (built April 2026). It presents a substantially smaller attack surface than the TP-Link BE800 audited previously — the web server, Samba, and UPnP are the only TCP services exposed to the LAN by default voice.
The single most important finding: the sshenabled daemon listens on UDP port 22 and is designed to accept a “magic packet” that would spawn a consoled shell and open firewall holes. This is the same class of backdoor found on many Netgear routers (the “telnet enable” mechanism), though on this model it uses SHA-256 hashed credentials and the daemon is named sshenabled rather than pu_telnetEnabled. We were unable to produce a valid magic packet during this audit — the packet structure differs from both the legacy (plaintext-password) and RAX30-style (SHA-256) implementations we tested, or the daemon may require additional state. This mechanism remains a latent LAN-side root backdoor for anyone who reverse-engineers the correct packet format.
Second finding: the router’s web server (httpd) and other services are crash-prone under light port scanning. During the audit, a single nmap -p- scan caused the web UI (ports 80/443) and several other services to become unresponsive, requiring a power cycle to restore. This suggests poor input handling or resource exhaustion in the embedded services.
Beyond those, the firmware ships a number of network daemons (Samba, MiniDLNA, UPnP, Bitdefender security suite, etc.) at versions that are difficult to independently verify since the root filesystem is squashfs (read-only) and the firmware is a monolithic OEM build.
1. System identification
Property<br>Value
Hardware model<br>Netgear Nighthawk RS700S (BE19000)
Board ID<br>U12H494T00_NETGEAR
Firmware version<br>V1.0.11.6 / 2.0.111
Firmware build date<br>Apr 7 2026
U-Boot<br>2019.07 (Apr 7 2026)
OS<br>Proprietary (Broadcom-based, not OpenWrt)
Kernel<br>Linux 4.19.275 #1 SMP PREEMPT aarch64
Root filesystem<br>squashfs (read-only), with ubi:data (ubifs, writable) for persistent config
Toolchain<br>BusyBox dated Feb 9 2023
WAN IP<br>DHCP from upstream (RFC1918 subnet)
LAN IP<br>Subnet gateway address
2. What is actually listening (live state — from debug log netstat.txt)
Filtered to network-reachable sockets (loopback-only services omitted):
TCP
Port<br>Process<br>Reachable from LAN?<br>Notes
53<br>dnsmasq<br>Yes<br>DNS resolver
80<br>httpd<br>Yes<br>Main web server (redirects to HTTPS)
139<br>smbd<br>Yes<br>NetBIOS session service (Samba)
443<br>lighttpd<br>Yes<br>HTTPS reverse proxy to httpd on loopback :80
445<br>smbd<br>Yes<br>SMB/CIFS file sharing
7681<br>websockd<br>Yes<br>WebSocket daemon (Nighthawk app communication)
8200<br>minidlna.exe<br>Yes<br>MiniDLNA media server
9443<br>httpd<br>Yes<br>Direct HTTPS management interface
49152<br>hostapd<br>Yes<br>WiFi management (per-radio)
56688<br>upnpd<br>Yes<br>UPnP control point
UDP
Port<br>Process<br>Reachable from LAN?<br>Notes
22<br>sshenabled<br>Yes<br>Magic-packet listener — see Finding F-01
53<br>dnsmasq<br>Yes<br>DNS
67<br>udhcpd<br>Yes (broadcast)<br>DHCP server
137/138<br>nmbd<br>Yes<br>NetBIOS name/datagram services
1900<br>upnpd, hostapd<br>Yes<br>UPnP SSDP
5353<br>mdns<br>Yes<br>mDNS (Bonjour)
56388<br>upnpd<br>Yes<br>UPnP advertisement
3. Software inventory
Versions determined from the debug log file listing (binaries in /usr/sbin/, /usr/bin/, /sbin/, /bin/).
Component<br>Version / Date<br>Notes
Linux kernel<br>4.19.275<br>LTS, but this is an older point release (~2023 vintage)
BusyBox<br>Feb 9 2023 build<br>Multi-call binary
OpenSSL<br>1.1.1 (libcrypto.so.1.1, libssl.so.1.1)<br>EOL since Sep 2023 — see F-08
dnsmasq<br>Feb 9 2023 binary<br>Version not independently confirmed
Samba (smbd/nmbd)<br>Custom build at /usr/local/samba/<br>Version not independently confirmed
MiniDLNA<br>minidlna.exe<br>Running (TCP 8200)
hostapd<br>Broadcom-patched<br>3 instances (2.4GHz, 5GHz, 6GHz radios)
Bitdefender suite<br>Multiple daemons<br>bdsetter, bdexchanged, bdcloudd, bdboxsettings, boxbdnc, bddevicediscovery, bdbrokerd, bdvad, bdgusterupdd, bdgusterd, bdheartbeatd, gusterupd, guster
lighttpd<br>/sbin/lighttpd<br>HTTPS reverse proxy
httpd<br>/usr/sbin/httpd<br>Main web server
UPnP<br>upnpd<br>TCP 56688, UDP...