While October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, cable internet providers are focused year-round on protecting their networks and their customers by building security into every layer, from the core network to the Wi-Fi inside the home.
The industry highlighted the importance of protecting America’s networks at last month’s SCTE TechExpo26 in Atlanta. NCTA President & CEO Cory Gardner sat down with National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross at the event to discuss how AI is reshaping the threat landscape and how government and industry can stay ahead of it together.
That conversation comes as internet providers upgrade their networks to deliver even faster speeds and prepare for the next generation of Wi-Fi. For our industry, security is integrated from the start.
Here’s a look at how internet providers protect their networks and the customers who depend on them.
Stopping Threats at the Gateway
The typical American home now has more than 20 connected devices, and many of them, like smart TVs and cameras, can’t run their own security software. Providers are closing that gap by delivering protection through the network and the home gateway, giving customers a simple way to secure every connected device:
- Spectrum Security Shield protects subscriber networks and devices from online threats using enhanced security and AI-enabled defense tools.
- Spectrum blocks 500 million online threats on average every month.
- Comcast’s intelligent home protection platform, Xfinity Shield, uses AI capabilities embedded across its network to turn home Wi-Fi into an always-on layer of protection – including cybersecurity. Included at no cost to Xfinity Internet customers, the Xfinity CyberSecure feature helps protect every device connected to the Xfinity Gateway from malware, phishing, hacking, and other threats before they reach the home.
- Comcast identifies, filters, and blocks an average of 30 million threats every day, protecting the more than one billion devices connected to its network.
- Midco includes protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which try to overwhelm a network with traffic, for every internet customer. Its Midco Wi-Fi service also offers Advanced IoT Protection, which quarantines smart home devices when unusual behavior is detected.
- Mediacom launched Advanced WiFi powered by eero 7, with built-in security, encryption on every device, and ongoing security updates to keep the home network protected.
Behind these services are industry-wide standards at work. CableLabs’ Gateway Device Security Best Common Practices, updated in March 2026, give providers and equipment makers a shared security baseline for cable modems, routers, and Wi-Fi access points.
Putting AI to Work on Defense
AI is making cyberattacks faster and cheaper to launch. Comcast Business’s 2026 Cybersecurity Threat Report, released this month, analyzed 79.3 billion events across its cybersecurity customers, an average of 2,514 every second, and found attackers using AI tools to build new exploits before fixes are available.
Behind the scenes, providers are using AI to spot and stop threats faster:
- As a member of Project Glasswing, Comcast is working in partnership with Anthropic to leverage frontier AI models to enhance the cyber protection of the Comcast network. For operators of critical infrastructure like Internet Service Providers, this access is key to staying ahead of vulnerabilities and patching systems before bad actors have the opportunity to exploit them.
- Spectrum’s AI-enabled technology suppresses unwanted communication between devices and internet scammers and analyzes network and connected device activity to detect abnormal behavior as new threats emerge.
Partnership Makes It Work
No single company can secure the network alone. As Gardner and Cairncross discussed at TechExpo, staying ahead of AI-powered attackers will take both industry innovation and government partnership.
Through CableLabs and SCTE, providers and equipment makers develop shared security standards. The industry also works closely with government.
- NCTA, along with Comcast and Charter, serves on the Executive Committee of the Communications Sector Coordinating Council (CSCC), the industry-led council that works with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to share threat information and coordinate incident response.
- NCTA also participates in the FCC’s Communications Security, Reliability, and Interoperability Council (CSRIC), a federal advisory committee that recommends ways to strengthen the security and reliability of the nation’s communications networks.
The industry has also led the way on securing internet routing, the system that directs traffic between networks. Cable providers helped found the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) initiative, and CableLabs and NCTA worked with operators, including Spectrum, Comcast, and Midco, to publish a routing security framework aligned with NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework.
Across the industry, the approach is consistent: build security into the technology from the start, stop threats before they reach customers, and work with government to stay ahead of what comes next.
