If you have a Netgear router, you can visit routerlogin.net and it will resolve to the IP address of your router for easy access to the admin configuration interface. Previously I believed this was implemented by having the DNS forwarder inside the router respond with its own internal IP for any lookups for routerlogin.net.
However I recently discovered that routerlogin.net still resolved to the router's IP even when the unit was configured only as an access point, operating in a network with a separate router / external DNS server. That would seem to imply that it was able to hijack DNS requests to 8.8.8.8 even when it is only an access point and the computer and a separate router are both configured to use 8.8.8.8 for DNS.
How is routerlogin.net implemented?
1 Answer
I just did some experiments with a router that doesn't implement routerlogin.net. It looks like it's an actual site (host routerlogin.net gives me 54.148.95.40 and 52.35.90.247). It tells me I'm not connected to my router's wifi network.
You can configure a router externally, if it is set up appropriately, so routerlogin.net probably uses that interface.
How does it know that you're using a netgear router? That's probably sent to the page, and it uses that information to let you log in
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