Clicked on “Restore Factory Settings” last night, because lesser forms of rebooting didn’t seem to be solving a signal strength problem, and ever since then the router has been insisting we change our network name and network password.
Tried typing in name and password printed on the router and it said specifically not to do that 
Yes, at least the new modems do this, I don’t remember if the old ones do. IIRC, you have to enter what’s on the router first and then you have to change it? It’s a good thing. Drive-by hacking and botnets largely rely upon people not changing the defaults (most people won’t unless you make them). Making us change them gives us some herd immunity.
It’s also a convenience if you’re setting up a new modem, you can just set the SSID and password to be what your old one had been, and not have to change all your phones/computers.
Yeah but we already have a newer modem where the “defaults” are things like “HOME-167D-2.4” and “copper6612explain” — that is, they come pre-individualized before they ever get to us.
Maybe it has something to do with the KRACK security problem. Maybe we just never did a factory reset before and it was always supposed to do this.
As if I’d leave Comcast WiFi enabled.
The rash of “Change your passwords because of Krack” is ridiculous. It would do absolutely nothing.
And, if your wireless devices can connect to a different router using the same SSID and Password - then there isn’t any real security there.