Holy canoli! Could those new Linksys Wireless-G Cable Gateways (WCG200) that Comcast is leasing to its cable subscribers be a trojan horse for Comcast to sniff what’s living inside your private home network?
If you scroll through the press release, you come to a section which says that the gateway supports a CableHome 1.0 for the ability to deliver secure, managed services from Comcast s head-end network to the subscribers home network. Now there is a big problem with this thing – for instance, the Cablehome 1.0 standard allows cable operators to snoop around their home networks and learn things such as how many computers are attached to the gateway and what kind of traffic they are generating/receiving. (Beware Vonage fans, this could be used to detect your Vonage ATA as well.)
Om Malik’s on the case: he’s waiting for a response from both Linksys and Comcast. Cable operators have been able to determine what’s behind your NAT router for years (if they really wanted to, anyway) but it’s somewhat ungood if they have a simple door right into your network.
Read [GigaOm]
