The Author – Bart Busschots
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May
29
Irish Broadband – First Impressions
Filed Under Computers & Tech on May 29, 2008 | 4 Comments
I’ve been holding off on this post for a while just to be sure I didn’t speak too soon. Simply put, I am delighted with IBB. They deliver what they promise. Simple as that. My traffic graphs are almost perfectly flat when downloading large files, and right on the money in terms of speed. This service bears all the hall-marks of a happy and un-stressed TCP/IP network. So far I have no complaints at all. The modem supplied works perfectly with my existing router, and I have no idea what support is like because I haven’t needed them.
Long may this continue!
[tags]Irish Broadband, IBB, broadband, internet, Ireland[/tags]
Oct
2
Eircom’s Response to the Security Issues Recently Raised
Filed Under Security, Computers & Tech on October 2, 2007 | 12 Comments
Please note that this article is a follow-on article from two previous articles (Eircom Exposes Its Broadband Customers to Serious Security Risks and Eircom Security – More Bad News and Some Suggested Solutions). The previous articles lay out the problems and some suggested solutions in detail. This article will not repeat those detailed explanations and justifications. I am writing this article with the assumption that readers will have first read the two original articles.
This article starts by presenting the details of Eircom’s response before providing a brief analysis leading to some conclusions. For those of you too lazy to read the whole article, were this to be school I’d give Eircom a passing grade, but not a great one. Say a high D or a low C.
[tags]Eircom, Netopia, WEP, WPA[/tags]
Sep
12
Eircom Security – More Bad News and Some Suggested Solutions
Filed Under Security, Computers & Tech on September 12, 2007 | 35 Comments
This is a follow-up article to my earlier article Eircom Exposes Its Broadband Customers to Serious Security Risks. If you’re following the comments on that article you’ll see that I’m trying to bring these problems to Eircom’s attention. I haven’t gotten very far yet but I’ll keep updating those comments with what ever progress I manage to make. However, there has been another development that I feel I need to bring to people’s attention. This afternoon I was anonymously sent some very interesting information regarding yet another alleged hole in Eircom’s security. I MUST STRESS THAT I HAVE NOT VERIFIED THESE CLAIMS as to do so would involve attempting to break in to someone’s network and that’s illegal. However, should this prove to be true Eircom has yet another problem to fix. In this article I’ll start by explaining the alleged problem, then propose a simple solution, and end with some simple advice for Eircom customers who wish to protect themselves from these security vulnerabilities.
[tags]Eircom, Security[/tags]
Sep
11
Eircom Exposes Its Broadband Customers to Serious Security Risks
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Security on September 11, 2007 | 28 Comments
I had heard complaints from people in the past that Eircom didn’t seem to do the whole security thing properly at all. I guess I just hopped they’d have sorted themselves out by now. They haven’t. I’m not sure if it’s down to incompetence or just not caring about their customers, but, in my book there are no valid excuses for leaving your customers exposed. Eircom have chosen to give their customers a wireless router. This makes things a lot simpler for the customer since it means they don’t have to go messing around with cables and such, but it potentially opens them up to significantly higher security risks. In the relationship between an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and a customer, the ISP must be the one on top of security issues. The average broadband customer cannot realistically be expected to be a security expert. Customers can only be expected to follow instructions from their ISP, and they have every right to assume that these instructions will not expose them to serious risks. Having gone through the process of setting up Eircom broadband for my grandfather last weekend I can tell you they are totally failing to protect their users by instructing their customers to set up their networks in a way that is highly insecure.
[tags]Eircom, Broadband, Ireland, Security, WEP[/tags]