I was reading the preparations being made in Florida for Dorian’s wrath and I came across this:
TELECOMMUNICATIONS
To help residents and emergency personnel stay connected in the wake of Hurricane Dorian, Comcast has announced it is opening its network of almost 200,000 Xfinity WiFi hotspots throughout Florida to anyone who needs them, including non-Xfinity customers, free of charge.
Not complaining about Xfinity’s gracious offering, but a reminder that many of those now open hotspots are in private business and homes. I am just wondering if the owners know that and accept it. And also how secure that access to a WiFi router in a home can be.
My former boss referred to telecom companies generally as “wire stringers”, implying that they are good at putting up copper or aluminum but tech higher than that is more problematic. I trust Comcast to get me a TV signal. I trust the phone co. (just barely) to get me a landline. I don’t assume they can handle more complex stuff.
My Wifi box is my property, and it does what I want; Comcast has no say about it. Nor do they have anything to do with my firewall.
>> I trust Comcast to get me a TV signal. <<
You must be a new Comcast customer.
Likewise, re owning my own cable modem.
Of course, after a year, they tried to bill me for a year’s rent of a cable modem because they had no record saying I wasn’t renting one of theirs. I kid you not.
I had a conversation with xfinity about this a couple years ago. The basic answer I got was, the “public” wifi they provide is segregated at the MAC address level from the “private” network they give to the primary customer, and the bandwidth usage of the public clients has no affect on the private clients as they’re supposedly on different channels.
Being a computer guy, I can see how that works, but I still don’t trust it myself.
Air gap.
If it’s import to you and it must be in a digital format, you need to have it behind an air gap. If it’s connected to the Internet than you must assume it’s compromised.
I use xfinity/comcast, (no other options in my area) but I don’t ‘lease’ their equipment. I use my own modem and router/firewall. I’ll also establish a Windscribe VPN connection for anything even remotely sensitive.
By default the come enabled to low another Comcast customer to log into your router using their info.
Yea I turned that off in a hurry when I had them.