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I Finally Hacked My ISP Router and Turned It Into a Mini PC — Part 1
A little curiosity, an old ISP router, and an experiment that took me further than I expected. Here’s what happened when I decided to see what this device was really capable of.
After publishing the first article, I kept working on the router.
For days, I tried different approaches. I read firmware dumps, examined binaries, tested commands, rebuilt things, and went back to the serial console. The original goal was still the same: get enough control over this ISP-provided router to run something useful on it, preferably custom firmware.
I didn’t get there.
psst… You didn’t hear this from me, but here’s the secret door 👉 <button>Trust me, bro, no virus here…<button/>
At some point, I was ready to write another article explaining everything I had tried and why it hadn’t worked. But that didn’t feel like a particularly interesting follow-up. It would have been a long list of failed attempts, with no satisfying conclusion.
So, I kept the project around and occasionally returned to it.
Then I stopped returning to it altogether.
