I bought my Netgear router almost three years ago. The default username and password for the router were both admin but I changed it to something else. The router worked flawlessly and I did not have to open its settings. But now suddently, when my internet connection started to fail and my ISP told me to open router settings, I could not – because I had forgotten my router password! There is a reset switch behind the router but I did not want to use it and lose all settings. Thanks to Nir Sofer who has created a little tool called RouterPassView, using which I was able to recover my lost password.
RouterPassView is a small Windows application created by Nir Sofer. You can download it from his website. The free tool is a portable standalone application, so you do not need to install anything on your system. Just extract the archive contents and run RouterPassView.exe.
To use RouterPassView in order to recover your router password, you need a router configuration file that you might have saved when you had first setup the router. I had to go through my hard disk and finally found the router configuration file in a backup from three years ago. You can click on the open icon in the toolbar to browse, select and open the router configuration file. In a short time, the RouterPassView would start to decrypt your router configuration file and show the usernames, passwords and other data from it.
RouterPassView allows you to save the selected username – password combinations. You can save them in plain text, CSV or HTML file format. If you do not have a router configuration file, but you have saved the password in the Internet Explorer, then you can still recover that password through the Grab Password from the IE Window feature. To use this feature, just open the Internet Explorer window and type in the web interface address (usually 192.168.1.1). Then open RouterPassView and press the hotkey Ctrl+G.
It is worth mentioning that RouterPassView does not support all models and makes of routers. There are thousands of models in the market and new models are being released every month. It is simply impossible for RouterPassView to support them all. Still, it can decrypt the router configuration file of over fifty different models.
You can download RouterPassView from http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/router_password_recovery.html.