

Cable modem hacker faces up to 40 years in prison - jackfoxy
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/21489.cfm

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tptacek
This isn't someone who modded cable modems for the joy of exploration. He
tried to build a business on devices that stole service from Comcast.

~~~
papersmith
Assuming Comcast has a bandwidth cap, by spoofing real MAC addresses he's
basically stealing other users' bandwidth.

But then again, people steal wifi all the time.

~~~
blasdel
There's also no reason to spoof the MAC addresses of real subscribers.

If your modem's external MAC isn't in Comcast's (global!) subscriber table,
they give your modem a "walledgarden" default configuration file that causes
it to reset frequently, and a poisoned DHCP DNS that directs all queries to
their "Subscribe Now!" webserver.

Some of the European ISPs have countermeasures that rotate the names of the
configs frequently, but Comcast doesn't do that -- if you've modified your
modem, all you have to do is have your modem ask for a different config file
(the names of which it will sniff from your neighbors), and set a different
DNS server on the modem's immediate clients.

