Section 11.5 Cable Modems: A Cracker s Dream

   


11.5 Cable Modems: A Cracker's Dream

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Cable modem connections operate similarly to a LAN in that a rogue subscriber can sniff the data of many other subscribers. Most subscribers are not aware of this and are putting passwords, credit card numbers, and lots of other confidential data out "in the clear." This means operating on the assumption that all your outgoing and incoming packets are being sniffed, including your passwords for FTP and telnet sessions, e-mail, HTTP traffic, and rcp and rsh requests. (I do not recommend these latter two in any case due to other security weaknesses.)

The only secure solution is to encrypt all your network traffic. This would mean limiting your Web shopping to merchants that offer HTTPS and use ssh in place of telnet. (These suggestions are good ideas in any case.) The ssh package does have a useful way for encapsulating any TCP (but not UDP) communication to or from a particular service to encrypt it. The other end must support ssh for this to work. Your ISP might not want to bother with this for such services as Mail (SMTP on port 25).


       
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    Real World Linux Security Prentice Hall Ptr Open Source Technology Series
    Real World Linux Security Prentice Hall Ptr Open Source Technology Series
    ISBN: N/A
    EAN: N/A
    Year: 2002
    Pages: 260

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