cable modem

[Kurt Granroth]

Michael wrote:
> I was wondeing; my modem stays on 24 hours a day. Do people who do that have 
> to worry about crackers getting into it? Would you advise putting it in 
> stadby mode when not in use or is doing that kind of a useless venture?

Crackers cannot "get into" a cable modem at all so it's not something
you need to worry about.  To be able to get into it, there would need to
be some sort of foothold that they could get in the cable modem
itself... and there's nothing there that could do that.

The only time you hear of cable modem hacking or cracking is from the
consumer's point of view.  You might, for instance, be able to crack
your own cable modem to loosen some bandwidth limitations (possibly
illegal; definitely against your terms of service) or something similar.
 But there is no way to use it as a router one way or another.

Now there *is* cause for concern with whatever you are using for your
router.  If, for instance, you have a Linux box setup as your
firewall/router and it's hooked directly into your cable modem as the
first line of defense, then you had better be darn certain that your
system is rock solid.  If you just take a base Linux distro and install
it as-is on your firewall machine and then don't update it ever, then I
can almost guarantee that it will eventually be cracked.

If you have one of those $50 routers from Linksys, D-Link, Netgear, or
similar, then you are *probably* fine as long as you turn off remote
administration.  I haven't heard of anybody remotely breaking into a
firmware firewall/router if remote admin was turned off.  Doesn't mean
it can't happen, but I've never heard of it.

Kurt