Contributor

Comcast suffers ire of Torrent enthusiasts

Opinion
May 29, 20081 min

Not good. Comcast, in the news lately for throttling peer to peer file sharing services such as Bit Torrent, was hacked last night according to BroadBand Reports and this gleeful posting at TorrentFreak .

I actually visited Comcast.com for the first time last night (even though I am a Comcast subscriber.) I was looking for information on their Blast service which promises up to 16 mb of download speeds (except for file sharing 🙂 I was surprised that they are such a heavey duty content provider. Does that really work? Do subscribers actually visit their ISP’s home page? I know that used to work when AOL was hyper inflating their user base through mass mailing CDs but doesn’t everybody use an ISP as a utility and set their home page to Google?

Regardless of the behavior of the masses, Comcast took a hit to their content model when their DNS record was compromised and people were directed to a hacker page.

Follow me on Twitter.

Richard Stiennon is chief research analyst at IT-Harvest, the firm he founded in 2005 to cover the 1,600 vendors that make up the IT security industry. He is the author of Surviving Cyberwar (Government Institutes, 2010) and There Will Be Cyberwar: How the Move to Network-Centric Warfighting Set the Stage for Cyberwar. He is a member of the advisory board at the Information Governance Initiative and principal of TrueBit Cyber Partners. He also serves on the R2-TAC, the technical advisory committee for the Responsible Recycling standard for e-waste.

Stiennon was chief marketing officer for Fortinet Inc. and vice president of threat research at Webroot Software. Prior to that, he was vice president of research at Gartner Inc. He has a B.S. in aerospace engineering and an M.A. in war in the modern world from King’s College, London.

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of Richard Stiennon and do not necessarily represent those of IDG Communications Inc. or its parent, subsidiary or affiliated companies.

More from this author