| | | <"Very clever, since most customers don’t know their routers are being used by Comcast.">
And quite dangerous since anyone with pretty simple tech can drive around sniffing out specific routers with exact GPS coordinates. I have a free sniffer app and can see over a dozen of my neighbors' routers, and coordinates accurate to within 3 ft, along with the frequencies their wifi routers are broadcasting and receiving as well as a whole bunch of other info -- I can see all of the key router hardware including brand/manufacturer, what type of firewall protection being used (or not used!), etc... if I were a bad guy, it would only take a few clicks and a couple lines of code to determine active nodes, what type of data is being sent/received at the packet level, a general idea of available sockets on each networked device -- and if there's hard-wired devices connected to their LAN, I could get inside via the wifi and mess with the hard-wired devices, too.
And on and on... there's a lot of powerful software tools that make the above easy.
For my own setup, I have fiber optic ADSL2 all the way into the house. The new router they sent me (T this time, but I switch a lot with Cox to lock it promo offers for 1-2 years and then switch back to the other one when they make special offers) is a cheapo broadband modem, wifi router and wired and switch/hub ports all in one (aren't they all these days?). The first thing I do when I swap out one modem/router/hub/wifi etc. for another is to connect to its IP address -- or even DHCP "server" that lists all active devices by IP # checked out and actively doing the handshake dance with the DHCP "server" -- once connected, I disable the wifi router T (or Cox) sent plug in a discreet switch/hub/router to one of the ethernet ports with both a static hardware firewall and additional software firewall I can configure myself in a non-standard way (hoping that alone would confuse the average low-level drive-by hacker wannabes) and then connect my own router and wifi to an ethernet port on the above box I connected between their router and mine. Then I custom configure my router and wifi LANs (one for me, one for the family and one for guests) with additional HW and SW firewalls and security including encryption at the packet level.
Call me paranoid, but a friend called me once to help him with this sort of thing after his entire LAN had been hacked and used as a massive spam IP spoofing repeater/relay to the point it consumed all of his bandwidth. If that person had wanted to, they easily could have stolen data or whatever (install a keystroke logger for example) and he'd really have had a pain. After that episode, I got busy figuring out how to make my setup harder to crack and take a lot longer than average -- on the theory that since a competent hacker can eventually crack almost any security protocols they encounter, by making mine harder and more time consuming, they'd be better off going after all of my neighbors' easy-to-hack-quickly setups and move on to easier pickings.
No way in hell I'd let a company -- any big ISP outfit -- use my stuff for whatever, but esp. NOT the gear in my house so they can provide hotspots for passersby and strangers... that's also a very tempting exploitable opportunity for their own cubicle farm dwellers numbed to death by their jobs. I like how the companies market these "features" to freedumb loving millenials, whose phones are covered with nose prints as they reduce their physical world to the tiny screen tethered to their un-mindful brains.
On the other side, I can only think of a very small number of things I'd volutarily do using such a hotspot as I pass by -- at least one of them will belong to someone who treats the repurposed idle HW hotspot feature as bait... I can see the alerts popping up on the screens in front of that guy in a bathrobe who hasn't showered in a couple weeks, eating cold pizza and tweaking while waiting for the next victim to come into range.
Yeah, I'm that guy who never uses free wifi for anything other than checking the weather forecast or some such benign activity.
Sorry for the rant... had a few run-ins with my service providers recently that left me in a foul mood about such things. |
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