As many of you know, I own a few ASUS products. Specifically, this gaming PC that I use for cycling indoors on Zwift. And this ZenWiFi XT8 mesh router that I’ve been using for a few years now. But today, I am going public with this statement.
Anyone who reads this blog should not buy ASUS products. Ever.
There’s a pair of reasons that drove me to make this statement. The first is their technical support. Which is abysmal. The second is that there’s an increasing pattern of ASUS not supporting their customers warranty claims by bullying them into paying for repairs that they don’t need.
Let’s start with their tech support. Or rather lack of it. I have had my own issues with their tech support as evidenced by this interaction with them where they couldn’t understand and help me with setting up a PPPoE connection that worked well. I ran around in circles with them for about two weeks before I got fed up with their incompetence. At the time, I said this:
What is worse is that all this troubleshooting was done via email which is the absolute worst way to provide tech support. Especially with complex issues like this. Getting onto a Zoom session or a phone call would have likely resulted in some sort of positive progress, and maybe even a solution. But they didn’t go that route and the net result of this rather negative experience is that it drove me to look at other options that avoided the use of PPPoE to get better performance from the XT8. It also made me decide that I won’t be recommending ASUS gear to my home and prosumer clients anymore. And chances are, my next router at home won’t be an ASUS product. While ASUS has great hardware, their support doesn’t meet the mark. Having competent tech support adds to the value of the gear that a vendor like ASUS makes. Or in this case, not having competent support detracts from the value of the gear that ASUS makes. So if the people at ASUS are reading this, they might want to look at this negative situation and make changes internally to make sure that they’re not on the wrong side of a public post like this as this sort of #Fail reflects poorly on ASUS as a brand. And will likely affect their future sales.
Since I wrote that, I’ve received dozens of emails from people that have had similar experiences with their tech support. That’s not a good look for ASUS because a company is only as good as the support they provide your customers. And if they provide bad support to their customers, those customers will get fed up and not be their customers any longer. And they will tell their friends, or someone like me who has the reach to tell a whole lot of people about how bad that ASUS tech support is. ASUS should consider that and change course before they have no customers to speak of.
That brings me to the second point. Which is ASUS not supporting their customers warranty claims by bullying them into paying for repairs that they don’t need. YouTube channel Gamers Nexus has investigated the bad behaviour of ASUS in the past. And their latest video details what looks like a systemic pattern of ASUS trying to extract cash from users who send in their hardware for warranty repairs by bullying them into paying for extra repairs that they don’t need. I would set aside 30 minutes to watch this video to get the full story:
The thing is, this isn’t the first time that ASUS has been caught doing something shady. If you do a search for “Gamers Nexus ASUS” on YouTube, you can see all the shady stuff that they have been caught doing. In addition, right to repair advocate and YouTuber Louis Rossmann has his own take on this:
If that’s not enough, there’s actually more. A Reddit thread surfaced in the last few days where ASUS quoted a Canadian customer a mind blowing $2799 USD to repair an RTX 4090 GPU that needed its 16-pin power connector replaced. The price is insane because the card had been purchased two week before this happened for $2050 USD. To say that the behaviour of ASUS is a bit suspect in this is an understatement.
On top of the fact that YouTuber JayzTwoCents dumped them as a sponsor to his channel because of their shady behaviour a while back. Here’s the video that details why he did that:
This is pretty bad for ASUS. When A YouTuber dumps you, you know you’re in a bad place.
Now in my case, I’ve been doing some dumping of ASUS products of my own. The PC that I mentioned earlier has been removed from service and replaced by this M2 Pro Mac mini. The PC in question is now sitting in my storage locker waiting to be sold. If you’re interested, I’ve got a fresh install of Windows 11 and it’s ready to go. Email me and we can take it from there. Now while I do have my issues with Apple, they support their customers and they don’t have a reputation for shady behaviour like ASUS does. Thus I will continue to buy products from Apple as they have largely demonstrated that they deserve my money.
Next up is my mesh router. While the XT8 mesh router has been generally reliable, the shady behaviour of ASUS combined with my negative tech support experience will mean that a mesh router from from another company will take its place when it’s time for me to go to WiFi 7. Right now the leading contender to replace the XT8 is Netgear who used to be suspect in terms of how they handled security issues, but have very much improved on that front after being called out on that front repeatedly. Though I have to admit that I’m looking at other companies as well, and I will base my decision on what I go with on the following criteria:
- Security posture: In other words, how well they deal with security issues. Such as deploying patches and how fast they go public in terms of letting their customers know about severe issues that need immediate attention.
- Performance: I want my router to give me top notch performance at all times because I want to maximize the speed of my Internet connection at all times.
- Product Support: As I said earlier, a product is only as good as its support. So this is going to factor into what I get.
I’m hoping to do this switch this year. But one of the things that I am waiting on is WiFi 7 routers to appear in quantity so that I get a fair amount of choice before serving up my credit card to pay for it.
The only other thing that I’ve done is that I stopped recommending ASUS products to my home and prosumer customers. In fact, that happened about a year and a half ago when I had that negative experience with ASUS tech support. The reason I stopped recommending them is that when I recommend something, it has to be something that I would be willing to stake my reputation on. I can’t stake my reputation on recommending ASUS products. No way, no how.
Finally if you have had an issue with ASUS when it comes to the warranty repair of a product, report it as per the advice of Louis Rossmann and Gamers Nexus. In the US you can file a report using this link:
If I find a similar reporting vehicle for Canada, I will post it here. The point is that if enough people report the behaviour of this company to the feds, then ASUS will have a whole lot of explaining to do.
So in short, I am done with ASUS. Given the issues with ASUS that have been exposed by others, and the issues that I’ve personally experienced, the only conclusion that you should come to is that ASUS doesn’t deserve your money. And one of the best ways to drive that point home to ASUS other than to report their behaviour to the feds is to not buy their gear. After all, ASUS may not care about how consumers feel about them. But they sure will care about their bank account getting smaller and smaller as consumers don’t buy their products. Maybe then ASUS will change course and become a company that cares about consumers rather than appear to screw them over at every opportunity. Though I am not holding my breath on that front given how they have behaved up until now. But I suppose anything is possible.
Dell Gets Pwned…. 49 Million Customers Affected
Posted in Commentary with tags Dell, Hacked on May 14, 2024 by itnerdLate last week, after threat actors posted evidence of a hack on BreachForums, Dell started warning 49 million customers that a threat actor has obtained their personal information through a data breach using a partner portal API they accessed posing as a fake company. The breach was first reported by DailyDark Web. The data includes detailed customer information on Dell system purchases s between 2017 and 2024. With a huge portion of Dell’s $88.4 billion in annual revenue coming from sales to the US government, this reaches deeply into that sector.
The data includes customer information of purchases made from Dell in the US, China, India, Australia, and Canada. Data stolen includes:
The threat actor known as Menelik put the data up for sale on the Breached hacking forum on April 28th and told BleepingComputer that they were able to steal the data from a portal for Dell partners, resellers, and retailers. All Menelik had to do was register multiple accounts under fake company names and he had access within two days without any additional verification.
“It is very easy to register as a Partner. You just fill an application form,” Menelik said.
“You enter company details, reason you want to become a partner, and then they just approve you, and give access to this “authorized” portal. I just created my own accounts in this way. Whole process takes 24-48 hours.”
The threat actor claims they could harvest the information of 49 million customer records by generating 5,000 requests per minute for three weeks, without Dell blocking the attempts.
The threat actors said they emailed Dell on April 12th and 14th to report the bug to their security team but apparently Dell never replied to the emails and didn’t fix the bug until approximately two weeks later, around the time the stolen data was first put up for sale on the Breach Forums hacking forum.
Ted Miracco, CEO, Approov Mobile Security had this to say:
The breach was conducted via an API accessible through the partner portal, which Menelik accessed using the fake accounts. The ability to generate 5,000 requests per minute for an extended period without being flagged or blocked by Dell’s security systems points to inadequate rate limiting and abnormal activity detection on Dell’s APIs, beyond the blatantly lax vetting process for registering partners. This lack of robust API security controls such as proper throttling and anomaly detection mechanisms exposed Dell to prolonged unauthorized data extraction. The breach impacts customers across multiple major markets, including the US, China, India, Australia, and Canada, potentially exposing Dell to regulatory scrutiny and fines under various data protection laws like GDPR, CCPA, and others. Moreover, the breach should erode trust among Dell’s customers and partners, affecting its reputation negatively.
Dell has a lot of explaining to do. There is no way that this should have happened. I hope that Dell gets smacked silly by authorities everywhere so it send a message that companies have to make every effort to protect customer data without fail. And that there’s going to be punishment if that’s not happening.
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