Really amazing. I was going to post something about MyDoom and how that virus impact on a normal postmaster but I’ll gonna do it later because I found much more interesting that new about cable modems…
It appears in slashdot that a group called tciso explain how to flash your cable modem firmware by using a not documented method and let you manipulate yor surfboard Motorola cable modem.
There are an interesting article that explains details about it. I just wanna to highlight a few things:
- by flashing your surfBoard cable modem you may access to a shell remotely, this hardware runs VxWorks 5.x O.S. on a MIPS processor (by default just your ISP may put software and acces to your surfBoard cable modem)
- eavesdropping risks: that hardware don’t let you sniff traffic outside your cable modem. if you substitute default software with this one you may sniff unless your ISP use encryption. Hardware comes ready for encryption but your ISP may use it or doesn’t.
- about programming skills: a tciso programer says that when she asks to leader team for a different and better assembler for MIPS, leader team -called DerEngel wrote a new one from the scratch. That is what a call a very good skill.
Why is this so interesting for me? My ISP uses that cable modem.