"There's a gray area there, but theft of service is a crime no matter where you're at," he said.Īuthorities say Harris' company, TCNISO, made more than $1 million selling cable-modem-hacking materials between 20, according to court documents. In January, Harris told that changing MAC addresses in order to get free Internet service was "morally wrong and probably illegal." Using a fake MAC address can also make Internet surfing untraceable, a feature that could help criminals hide their footsteps from law enforcement. According to the indictment, Harris helped develop tools that could be used to sniff MAC addresses in order to get on the network free. "If you use it to steal service, you're breaking the law."Ĭable modems can also be configured to use a paying customer's MAC (Media Access Control) address to steal service. "If you buy a modem and you can hack the firmware, it's your piece of hardware," he said. Pollock said he published the book to give Internet users good information about how to tinker with their modems and get diagnostic information, some of which is blocked by Internet service providers. However, the question of whether uncapping a modem is illegal is "not clear," according to Bill Pollock, founder of No Starch Press, which published Harris' 2006 how-to book, Hacking the Cable Modem. Hackers have known for years that certain models of cable modem, such as the Motorola Surfboard 5100, can be hacked to run faster on a network, a process known as uncapping. "These modems were capable of hacking a cable network and obtaining free Internet service," the indictment states. Federal Bureau of Investigation agent bought modems and a book by Harris about cable-modem hacking. The arrest follows a November 2008 undercover sting operation, where a U.S.
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