I installed a new Netgear router yesterday and discovered that when I changed the default password I could no longer access the unit.

I’ve been like this before and I think that I may have dumped a D-link modem under similar circumstances, however I stray from the topic.

It dawned on me after a while that because I like strong passwords I frequently include special characters that it might be the special character that was the issue. So I experimented and confirmed my thoughts.

Using special characters like % sign will act as an escape character which means both it and the next character will be treated as special and effectively ignored.

Example:

New password = %password
Actual recorded password = assword

Now I did not test this in the middle of a password but I am guessing it will be the same.

Bottom line is that when doing password changes in a Netgear and including special characters be aware that it may escape the characters making it appear that you cannot login when all you need to do is remove the escape’d characters from the password.