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Comcast Mobile Helping Attackers?

A bad security decision by Comcast on the company's mobile phone service made it easier for attackers to port victims' cell phone numbers to different carriers. Comcast in 2017 launched Xfinity Mobile, a cellular service that uses the Verizon Wireless network and Comcast Wi-Fi hotspots. Comcast has signed up 1.2 million mobile subscribers but took a shortcut in the system that lets users switch from Comcast to other carriers. To port a phone line from Comcast to another wireless carrier, a customer needs to know his or her Comcast mobile account number. Carriers generally use pin numbers to verify that a customer seeking to port a number actually owns the number. But Comcast reportedly had set the PIN to 0000 for all its customers, and there was apparently no way for customers to change it. That means that an attacker who acquired a victim's Comcast account number could easily port the victim's phone number to another carrier.

Comcast has indicated that the number-porting attack affected only customers who reused passwords across multiple sites. Comcast's statement also said that "the fraudulent porting of mobile numbers is a well-known industry issue and not unique to Xfinity Mobile." But Comcast could have minimized the risk of attack, even for people using weak account passwords, by requiring customers to choose a unique PIN when signing up for mobile service. This all just goes to show you how small things like this can create huge problems when gone unnoticed. In this case, I believe Comcast should know that any default login credentials should never be used. We are taught to always change defaults when setting up any network utilities in IT.

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