Infiltrating MediaOne

by Lobo The Duck

First off, let me give you the obligatory line.

I am not in any way condoning, encouraging, or soliciting people to crack into MediaOne Express.  I like their service a lot.  And if you f*ck it up for me, I hope they come down on you like a ton of frozen shit.

As of today, I'm now a subscriber for MediaOne Express.  And it rocks!!

Timeline

12:00 PM.  Hid my Linux manuals, CDs, and my 32-port switch.  No reason to make the installers nervous.

12:30 PM.  Cable layer shows up, surveys the install area and proceeds with the install.

12:45 PM.  Separate line for my cable modem drilled through my room wall.

12:50 PM.  Went out to do some social engineering with the cable layer.  Turns out that my place was on the old coax head.  Did some chatting and got my entire place rewired over to the new fiber optic feed (which they'd called about looking to charge us for) for free.  Turns out that MediaOne is going over to a fiber network in their entire Chicago-area territory.  Fiber to the header, and then coax to the curb.

1:00 PM.  Installs the splitter in a new junction box on the back of my place.

1:20 PM.  Cable install finished and the line tested.

1:30 PM.  The modem installers are at the front door.  They come in, plug the modem into the wall and my NIC, call the office and activate the modem.  Windows 98 boxen, just to keep the installers happy.

1. Do not specify an IP address.
2. Turn print and file sharing off (unless you like giving people access to your entire system and implanting stuff like Back Orifice).
3. Disable DNS and WINS.
4. Reboot.
5. Run WINIPCFG.EXE, change from ppp0 to eth0, and then drop and reacquire an IP.

1:45 PM.  After sharing some cable sharing info with the modem guy (who's looking to set up his own home network on his cable modem) (much of which can be found at www.cablemodeminfo.com/cablesharing.html), the cable guys have me sign my service agreement (I can see holes already) and leave.

1:50 PM.  I notice they forgot to leave me the password for my e-mail account.  I call MediaOne and ask about it.  More social engineering ensues.  The "tech" on the other end slips and reveals to me that the default password for all new e-mail accounts on the MediaOne system is: password

Passwords can be changed on www.ce.mediaone.net (the password changing function is web-based and left up to the subscriber).