Hardware hacker charged with selling cable modems that get free broadband

paintb4707

Hardware Hacker Charged With Selling Cable Modems That Get Free Broadband -- Update | Threat Level from Wired.com

the user can set their own upload and download rates, and change the MAC address — the unique identifier normally hard-coded into a modem.

tiersten

You've been able to do that for a long time now. People either reflashed the firmware in the cable modem or exploited a flaw in most implementations of how a DOCSIS modem requests its configuration.

You're on a shared segment so if everybody starts messing around with the caps then you'll all suffer.

Devin McCloud

yep, there were tutorials on how to do this since I got my first cable connection in 2003. A lot of people were facing criminal charges for uncapping their modems.

tiersten

The cable company can tell if anybody is download/uploading faster than they should be able to. If you change the MAC address then they'll also notice that a new modem has appeared that doesn't correspond to any of their records.

You're not as safe as they make out. If the cable company really wants to get you, they will.

KGhaleon

There's software for changing your NIC MAC address too so that it shows up differently on the network.

tiersten

KGhaleon wrote: »

There's software for changing your NIC MAC address too so that it shows up differently on the network.

Its usually built into the NIC driver. I've had users messing around with that before and caused havoc.

vCole

The thing is, they can never tell which exact house it is. It only goes down the node as far as them tracking it.

tiersten

FadeToBright wrote: »

The thing is, they can never tell which exact house it is. It only goes down the node as far as them tracking it.

Yup. Just don't piss them off enough to warrant sending somebody out to check.

JavonR

FadeToBright wrote: »

The thing is, they can never tell which exact house it is. It only goes down the node as far as them tracking it.

Indeed this is true. If someone were smart they would just put their modem at a 5mb or 10mb connection and not uncap it... this would create a lot less attention.

I hate to be harsh towards the ISP, but there are MANY ways to counter this. I work for a cable company and it is all but impossible to do it on our network, and we've had people try

Pash

FadeToBright wrote: »

The thing is, they can never tell which exact house it is. It only goes down the node as far as them tracking it.

This has all sorts of strong legal implications as well. As far as I know here in the UK at least, if you purchase the cable modem when you signed up to your ISP, it is your property. Therefore the cable company cannot claim right to have access to their property (because it isnt) and would require a warrant to have access to your property if they believed you were involved in misuse of their provided service.

A friend of mine used to take advantage of uncapping on a former UK cable provider, never got caught but I don't know if I would ever take the risk.

tiersten

Pash wrote: »

This has all sorts of strong legal implications as well. As far as I know here in the UK at least, if you purchase the cable modem when you signed up to your ISP, it is your property. Therefore the cable company cannot claim right to have access to their property (because it isnt) and would require a warrant to have access to your property if they believed you were involved in misuse of their provided service.

Badly designed system to be honest. You're trusting the client to be good and throttle itself to the configured caps. I'd assuming that they can temporarily isolate an individual line however from the outside and test it in isolation.