Now that broadband Internet connection is in full swing, millions of cable users are at risk of serious security breaches.
By design, Israeli Security Company Checkpoint revealed that this extremely serious security vulnerability is caused by the shared architecture of the data channel that carries internet traffic within cable companies' fiber networks. This means groups of subscribers share a single cable connecting them to the local neighbourhood node. Each subscriber's signal is multiplexed on to this single cable by frequency division multiplexing (FDM).

Through Network Neighborhood, a hacker (or any neighbor) can see other system's names and addresses on the local service that have file sharing enabled, exploit the vunerablity and take control of these systems. Basically, the 'always on' connection that cable connected systems have is equivalent to an unprotected Ethernet Lan.

There is a way for users to protect themselves. The use of a firewall and disabling file and print sharing will actively prevent access to their systems.


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