Yes! Lots of fun could be had on old DOCSIS 1 networks, before everything was encrypted. Putting your NIC into promiscuous mode and using tcpdump or wireshark/e

Yes! Lots of fun could be had on old DOCSIS 1 networks, before everything was encrypted. Putting your NIC into promiscuous mode and using tcpdump or wireshark/ethereal/etc could yield a wealth of information about your neighbors. My favorite: If you could manage to have a capture running while someone (re)booted a cable modem you could easily grant yourself faster internet access. The process worked by capturing an example of the DOCSIS config file that the modem uses to provision itself on bootup. The modems would request these configs from a cable company TFTP server with a certain IP address. So if you got a neighbors config file and that neighbor paid for a higher service tier than you then you could fairly easily upgrade your internet speed by simply hosting that config file on a TFTP server in your local network using the same IP as the upstream _real_ TFTP server the cable company managed. Reboot your modem, watch it configure itself with your config file, profit! :) ..."good ole' days". I might be misremembering this slightly, but it really was fairly trivial to upgrade your service in those days.