<story><title>Comcast modem activation bug potentially exposed customers’ private data (2018)</title><url>https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mbkgn8/dont-rent-a-modem-from-comcast</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Merad</author><text>I wonder how much longer we&amp;#x27;ll even have the option to use our own equipment. Late last year I briefly tried AT&amp;amp;T fiber, and it was required to use their hybrid modem&amp;#x2F;router monstrosity. It didn&amp;#x27;t even have options to disable the router functionality, the best you could do was turn off its WiFi networks and disable its firewall. Even after setting all of my own passwords on it it was still possible to access settings through my AT&amp;amp;T account online, telling me that the thing is backdoored all to hell. TBH that thing was a big factor in me canceling the service after 5 days (also the service was mediocre and they tried to screw me on pricing).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>m463</author><text>I had a ginormous AT&amp;amp;T router&amp;#x2F;modem (pace 5268ac) with a set of static ip addresses and a few times, AT&amp;amp;T just stopped routing traffic to it.&lt;p&gt;It had happened before and then magically fixed itself a few days later.&lt;p&gt;One time I had a week of outage with AT&amp;amp;T basically said the problem was on my side.  They could ping the modem, and then punted.  I had several truck rolls.  The techs were really nice guys, but were basically cabling guys, better for finding a bad cable than debugging a packet loss.  The problem for me was that my ipv4 static ip addresses would not receive traffic.&lt;p&gt;I was at wit&amp;#x27;s end after a week and I debugged the thing myself.  By looking at EVERY bit of data on the router, I found mention of the blocked packets in the firewall log.  I would clear all the logs, and found even with the firewall DISABLED, the firewall log would see and block incoming packets I was sending using my neighbor&amp;#x27;s comcast connection.&lt;p&gt;I called AT&amp;amp;T, but this time mentioning &amp;quot;firewall is completely off, but packets are blocked by the router and showing up in the log&amp;quot; was concrete enough for them to look up a (known) solution.&lt;p&gt;The fix was to disable the firewall, but to enable stealth mode.  wtf?&lt;p&gt;To be clear, this was a firmware bug, and caused dozens of calls to AT&amp;amp;T, lots of heartache and finger pointing always in my direction.&lt;p&gt;I should also mention at the start of this fiasco, I checked the system log and noticed they pushed a firmware update to the modem at the time the problem started.  Strangely after one call to the agent, that specific line disappeared out of the log file, but other log entries remained.  hmmm.</text></comment>
<story><title>Comcast modem activation bug potentially exposed customers’ private data (2018)</title><url>https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mbkgn8/dont-rent-a-modem-from-comcast</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Merad</author><text>I wonder how much longer we&amp;#x27;ll even have the option to use our own equipment. Late last year I briefly tried AT&amp;amp;T fiber, and it was required to use their hybrid modem&amp;#x2F;router monstrosity. It didn&amp;#x27;t even have options to disable the router functionality, the best you could do was turn off its WiFi networks and disable its firewall. Even after setting all of my own passwords on it it was still possible to access settings through my AT&amp;amp;T account online, telling me that the thing is backdoored all to hell. TBH that thing was a big factor in me canceling the service after 5 days (also the service was mediocre and they tried to screw me on pricing).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jweir</author><text>What is old is new...&lt;p&gt;You used to not be able to own your phone - it was leased from AT&amp;amp;T. That was the only option until Ma Bell was broken up in the early 80s.</text></comment>