Unauthorized Internet
Thu Mar 3, 2011 3:11:44 am

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Since February 10, I have been connecting to the internet without proper authentication.

I switched modems because I had lost internet service for an entire day and I figured that it was worth a try. The new modem didn't help, but I left it connected and service was remotely restored. I just continued using this modem, because it's much newer than the other one that I had been using.

The modem that I am using requires a user name and password to establish a PPPoE connection. I noticed that it was letting me connect with the default user name of "newdsl" and some hidden default password. I figured that this might have some kind of time limit or it was the result of some oversight that would be fixed. I knew from prior experience that this default user name and password should only grant access to a limited number of Verizon sites and nothing else. I was surprised to see that I could access everything. I decided to put in what I thought were my correct user name and password, because I did not want an outage when policies changed. However, I misspelled my user name.

They finally reverted to the old policy today. This explains why I lost internet service again. Unlike usual interruptions in service, the modem reported that it had a strong signal. There was even an IP address obtained, but the modem failed all internal tests of connectivity. After a reset, I got the Verizon new DSL welcome screen and realized that they had pushed through a surprise update which included reverting to requiring a correct user name and password.