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How to Take Over a Train Station
ThinkComp writes "Everyone knows that home wireless networks are insecure, but who would expect a major transportation hub to be vulnerable to the same problems? Well, waiting for my friend's train at South Station in Boston, MA, I happened to notice that it was possible to take control of the entire station's wireless network, including its home page and authorization method (free wireless, anyone?)--and those of thirty other businesses throughout Massachusetts, thanks to a few coding errors on the part of the wireless company with which South Station contracted."
News at 11.
Here :)
liqbase
Summary: here's documentation of my illegal access to a system, please prosecute me, thanks.
no more running for trains - use your ipaq as a remote control for your very own train set.
and close the doors when you are all the way through
next stop: home
...icle: "Unless something is done to force accountability for wireless devices, perhaps by recording ethernet MAC addresses (which are unique and hard-coded to a physical piece of hardware)" ... uh, no they aren't. Most devices allow you to change your MAC with impunity. Others can be hacked to do so, by tweaking their firmware. MAC addresses meant something back in the day when they were hard to change (it's never been impossible) but those days are long gone.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I recomend telling Charlie. With internet access he could start a Dot Com and finaly earn that nickle he's been needing.
All your trains are belong to us!
This person merely tried common tricks to expose the network settings. Here's a summary:
1.) Try the default login/password combination and make some educated guesses.
2.) Look at the source code of web pages.
3.) Don't be an idiot admin and leave your system wider than your momma.
When you can play with the real thing?
Did you refund your friend's tickets?
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
At first this wasn't entirely the case. Consider, for example, copying all the files from /usr/bin to your home directory 1000 times. Back in the old days that would be enough to fill up the harddrive which would quickly stop other people from using the system. You could affect other people, the kernel didn't stop you, so it must be allowed right! Well no. You're wasting resources and being an asshole. But rather than put a sign on the wall that said "please don't waste disk space" someone decided this was a "security" issue and implemented disk quotas into the kernel. Now you can't affect other users by using up all the disk space.
Consider the "fork bomb" issue. For those who don't know, this is just like using up all the harddrive space, except instead of disk you're wasting memory. A fork bomb will quickly bring an older unix machine to its knees, and back in the days when I had the joy of sharing a unix lab with other students, a fork bomb would go off at least twice a day. Why? Cause if the kernel permitted it, it must be ok right? Now there's protections in most kernels just to detect a fork bomb and stop it.
Such a strange way of thinking. Thankfully most unix users do not try to apply this attitude to the real world. If there were to see the police or the government as some kind of kernel they might be surprised to find that they could kick over granny in the street or go ballistic with an automatic weapon. The police didn't stop me, it must be ok, right?
Just to bring this long post back on topic: just because you can take over the wireless internet of a train station, doesn't mean you should do it. It doesn't mean that it is permitted. There doesn't need to be a failsafe kernel monitoring and stopping every undesirable action that you can possibly perform. We can live with people being able to break the rules. It's called freedom.
How we know is more important than what we know.
BTW, for windows, there is a great tool called MacShift that will allow you to randomize your MAC address. Just make a shortcut and run it before you connect to any wireless network, and you'll have a different one each time. No tracing there.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
By the way, instructions on how to change your MAC address on various operating systems may be found in the wikipedia .
I just got a Wireless router the other day. What my room mates couldn't understand is why I locked down the router so hard. They were amazed that I had to put the WPA key on all the computers, and why I also did MAC and IP filtering. They just couldn't understand. Although it is not totally secure, hopefully it is enough to keep the dorks out and at the same time allow for wireless inconvience. The last thing that I want to worry about is some dork running around with a laptop and deciding that my internet is his internet and then doing something stupid.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
Ignoring the grandstanding title and the fact that the author astroturfed his own "article" and site, here's a quote:
A more farfetched, but very real possibility, is that computers or workers at airports and train stations also use these same networks to make everything tick. If that is the case, it might be possible for an intelligent high school student to start changing train timetables or rerouting baggage.
And his evidence for this is, what? His own personal opinion? He's been watching Hackers too much if he thinks the schedule board at South Station is networked; it's a -flip- chart (seriously, stick around for 5-10 minutes, and watch it update itself). I'd be amazed if it had anything better than a dedicated thinnet connection to an ancient PC. It's not like some kid with mad h@x0r skills is going to go bippity-boop and put up "TRAIN TO FUCKVILLE 4:20". No. That happens in Hollywood, where people "launch the genetic algorithmic viral defenses!". It does not happen in the real world.
There are a lot of cheap shots and snide remarks aimed at "The Guvmint", "The Man", etc. This guy sounds like he's about 19, not to mention he's just admitted to logging into places he knew he didn't belong AND changing settings (he changed the back, but still...) Sounds like a great federal inditement to me.
Some googling shows he's in his very early 20's(graduated from Harvard in 2004 in "3 years", which means he's maybe 21 now), runs some consulting company. Sounds like he's just out to promote his business like every other story submitter these days...
Please help metamoderate.
Well, it is nice that this guy actually bothered to write this up, but he seems to simply be using a lot of common mistakes and guesswork. On top of that, his knoweledge of some basic concepts in hardware administration and business processes is somewhat lacking.
First, MAC address are not unique. There is no universal table of MAC's that hardware manufacturers report to. I have installed ethernet cards from the SAME manufacturer that have had the SAME MAC address while setting up machines for a client.
Second, many of these errors are not necessarily the programmers fault. They are more than likely the responsibility of management being cheap and forcing programmers to do the jobs of multiple people. IT is seperate from software development. The fact that the network and server are insecure is the IT department/person's fault. In small companies this may be the same person, but in most large corporations that is not the case. Directory listing and permissions are generally the responsibility of the server administrator.
Now, the username issues are definitely scary. Leaving test accounts open with simple passwords is just plain stupid. The company I develop software for has over fifty million dollars worth of data on their servers. We also store credit card info for clients, etc. If we used common passwords like that, we would be fired. The admin would go through the database, see the passwords, and report them to our supervisor. Say goodbye! Not to mention, test accounts on production servers are bad practice anyway. If you are making any money, you are extremely stupid not to have a seperate development environment.
In my opionion, these problems seem to be more management and implementation problems, and not so much development problems as the author seems to suggest. They are still real problems though. That customer listing one for the phone company really scares me. ::shiver:: I hope SBC in Texas doesn't have problems like that.
Tired of free ipod spam sigs? Opt ou
Dear Department of Homeland Security,
We have recently come to our attention that you are using methods of pinpointing locations of individuals that may infringe on our "Latitude/Longetude" techniques (Patent Pending).
You are hereby ordered to cease & desist all location activity until you have properly licensed our intellectual property rights.
Yours Truly, -Microsoft Legal Team
Actually this is some very basic HTML hacking. He went to their service, which re-directs all new people to their home page. He directory surfed around the web server, and found a few dozen other sites, as well as the company's home page. He tried some very basic password combinations, (like test:test), and got control over some active sites. These sites included customer information and credit card databases.
So really, the site that served images from an unobfuscated directory allowed the person to know what to look for, the directory was fully listed in a way that directories shouldn't. The passwords were very, very insecure. This had nothing to do with wireless security, but rather web services security, and basic things for security that people don't do.
The passwords in the article, BTW, no longer function. At least, not form my remote machine. Anyone reading this from South Station wish to see if the passwords still work on-network?
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