A poorly maintained NBN Hybrid fibre-cable (HFC) network once used by Optus and Foxtel for pay TV poses massive security risks for you at home and for Australia’s national security.
If an amateur radio operator, operating legally, can wipe out the NBN throughout an entire neighbourhood, including taking an entire secondary college offline through no fault of their own, imagine what those with nefarious purposes can do.
Whilst these examples are made-up scenarios only, they are based on facts and knowledge of radio communications systems, including the NBN.
If my signal is going into the poorly maintained NBN by accident, then, let’s look at at such from a local level.
Example 1
Don’t like someone? There’s an intervention order against them, say a domestic violence incident. If there’s an unmaintained HFC cable nearby dangling, just pull up nearby and transmit.
A domestic dispute. Violence. Police are called. A man believed to be responsible for striking a woman is removed from their home by order of police.
The next day, the victim is using her home NBN to organise things, cut off bank accounts and contact people.
The perpetrator can just pull up nearby an unmaintained NBN HFC cable, press ‘transmit’ on a UHF CB (which anyone can buy) and there goes the NBN in the affected area.
Goodbye NBN in your area.
Example 2
A hacker with some technical skills pulls up next to that cable wrapped around a power pole and has the skills to convert it into a device, such as a laptop, which is easily done.
They could do so by just picking up the signal radiating from the unterminated cable, or park next to the power pole, and take a feed from the cable. There goes your data, straight to the hacker’s computer.
If a signal can go in, a signal can go out. So the hacker now has live access to the entire local neighbourhood’s NBN connection on the HFC cable and can watch what is going on.
Once connected to the unterminated cable dangling in the street, the hacker starts ‘pulling data’ from an entire suburb’s HFC NBN network.
Goodbye to your data. No scam text is required.
Example 3
Someone sees the unterminated cable, grabs a car battery and injects 13.8VDC (volts direct current). Bye bye NBN.
These are serious matters of national security that require addressing.
Pulling up next to an unterminated cable wrapped around a power pole that has not been terminated properly can easily be connected to devices, such as a laptop, in a car and away you go data collecting of the whole neighbourhood’s HFC-cable based NBN..
If terminated properly, doing the same would mean a ladder, climbing the power pole and connecting to the junction box which may look a bit suspicious.
An unmaintained network is a useless unsecured network. No amount of passwords and two-factor authentication will save you if the network isn’t maintained properly in the first place.
Experiments, including hacking into “other’s home networks” using these unterminated HFC cables were carried out.
Conducted by the author, within the law. Only the author’s own home network was ‘hacked into’ for test purposes and writing these reports using the unmaintained NBN HFC cables. The only data ‘stolen’ was my own.
