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Secret Service Goes War Driving
JSC writes "Looks like the Secret Service is taking a page from the WarDriving handbook. Your tax dollars at work includes springing for the Pringles can for the antenna."
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Peterson recently drove down a major Washington street and found over 20 wireless networks, many of which had no security at all. Peterson said his probes are part of good police work, like a patrolman driving through a neighborhood.
I know of someone who drove downtown in my hometown and picked up many wireless networks. This included 4 laptops with pringle can antennas. Among one of these networks he noticed the name was the state Lottery, thats right, the lottery. As he looked up, he was passing the building for the state lottery. It is interesting to see how many open wireless networks that there are in a town.
He also informed one company of the open network (he knew the network admin) and immediatly lost his ip for that network.
Is it illegal to pick up the wireless network as you drive by, if you don't do anything with it? Or is it illegal to pick it up and browse the net or both?
Maybe this publicity will create some market for a security product to be used for wireless. A lot of companies don't realize that wireless networks allow potential hackers an easy way around a firewall, and as such, there's little demand for a product to prevent such a breach. If the SS can bring that to light with their Pringles can, maybe that will change. And maybe Pringles will get into network hardware too. That'd be ironic.
Stories about wardialing are popping up everywhere now. So how do you prevent unauthorized access to your wireless LAN? I have 128-bit encryption enabled. Is that enough to prevent bandwidth stealing/snooping or is there something else?
Peterson recently drove down a major Washington street and found over 20 wireless networks, many of which had no security at all. Peterson said his probes are part of good police work, like a patrolman driving through a neighborhood.
"I feel it is part of crime prevention to knock on the door," Peterson said.
So that's what port scans are, just knocking on the door, part of crime prevention, and not malicious in and of itself.
I find it interesting that police officers can drive over the speed limit and run through red lights with their sirens on, but if Joe "gray" hat driver does the same thing, he gets a ticket or goes to jail. Give me a break dude.
The problem is that if Starbucks gets hacked because they were running wireless networks out of their coffee shops, it will be all over the news and the next day every right-thinking CTO will be demanding that their wireless LAN be taken down until the security risks have been evaluated.
By having an investigation of this type, informing leaky network owners of their problem and of possible solutions, you mitigate the Starbucks-hacked panic.
If your job is to protect national security and there are government agencies with networks that are wide open, then yes, you should be doing this...
People will only wake up when they become aware of the issue. Most people don't realize the severity of lax security on computers.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.