ASUS warns of critical remote authentication bypass on 7 routers

And if you absolutely do. Set up a VPN.

So glad my RT-AC86U kept having serious issues with the 2.4 GHz radio such that nothing would stay connected to the internet without 5 GHz support so I eventually trashed the damn thing after every solution failed.

Absolutely. Like why in the world would the article have a list of features included in each model of router?

Friendly reminder that OpenWrt supports Raspberry Pi and every Pi from 3 onwards makes for a great, inexpensive router. Adding WiFi can be done with any off-the-shelf WiFi router or access point, brand new or second hand. Since they aren't exposed to the Internet, remote vulnerabilities are significantly mitigated.

I got fed up with trying to find the right firmware each time. It was too much of a hassle. Then small issues with the one I had.. you need an earlier version... I love the idea, it was just a pain.

I thought OpenWRT doesn't support modems due to licencing issues.
So, I guess you would need a separate modem, or ISP router in bridge mode, or double NAT with OpenWRT being DMZ

Another friendly reminder, enterprise-grade routers like Mikrotik are fantastic. They don't have wifi builtin, so you may never need to upgrade it if you get fast enough uplink (mine is gigabit, so should be fine). You'll need a separate AP (I got Ubiquiti). They're way more feature complete than nonsense like these from ASUS, and they generally have more secure firmware.

If you are willing to spend a bit more upfront, I bought a mini PC in 2017 and installed opnsense on it. It's still rock solid. For wifi, I use a separate ap (a ubiquity UAP that I bought in 2015) and it is also going strong. Almost a decade of rock solid performance easily beats out any other router I've owned in terms of both performance and cost.

I can only get merlin on my rt-ax86u pro. Only aimesh for me!

Interestingly, I didn't get any prompts. It did tell me to manually restart the router but once it did, no prompts. RT-AC68U running 3.0.0.4.386_51915

Let us sell your data or we wont fix this massive bug that's also our fault.

Merlin has the problem that it doesn't have something like like aimesh where you can auto synch the config between all your routers. I've got a network of three Asus routers and they work great and I can admin them like they're one router, and I'd hate to have to give that to up.

Our router doesn't support it (it's the V2 model)

Will that let you download speeds greater than 160 mbps? The last time I tried Merlin, the ASUS router I had wouldn't download at full speed allowed by my internet connection?

Nah, those get their own, unique set of security issues, discovered or otherwise. Hint: every firmware does.