Adelphia's Cable Modems Compromised

texus writes "The Adelphia PowerLink Cable Modem Internet Service Provider, that serves 5.5 million customers nation wide, was found to be vulnerable of a major security flaw that allows cable modem subscribers to spy on each others traffic, as well as the ability to modify other users internet packets in realtime. The severity of a potential attack could allow a malicious subscriber to gain access to the customers private activity on the net, as well as the capabilities to hijack connections, intercept SSL/SSH/VPN encrypted sessions, hijack and poison dns servers, and perform a Denial of Service on the entire subnet. The advisory on BugTraq officially states that it didn't seem like Unix machines that logged onto the network were affected, but reports from other Adelphia subscribers indicate that this was inaccurate and Unix users are vulnerable as well."

Comments

What with the internet being useless and all

[Anonymous Coward]

A vast warehouse of porn and spam doesn't really need a lock, now does it?

Security

[MeanMF]

You mean that packets sent out over the Internet might be subject to interception?? The horror.

Hmm..

[(eternal_software)]

Well, I'm an Adelphia subscriber and I haven't noticed any problems so f

Unix boxes NOT secure

[A Guy From Ottawa]

From security focus bugtraq:

It seems to only affect windows users dhcp requests, as for *nix it hands off an entirely different subnet ip address that is not vulnerable. This doesn't stop one from booting into *nix and manually configuring their ip to be on the vulnerable subnet.

Does anyone else find that funny? Windows users are vulnerable to a security flaw by default (as usual). But, (if they feel left out) Unix users can configure their box to be vulnerable too!!