Hacking Hotels 101

romka1 writes "Wired has an interesting interview with Adam Laurie, chief security officer of the London security and networking firm ALD. Laurie was able, using laptop, tv tuner and an infrared port to access premium content, billing information of all the rooms in the hotel, watch how other guests access their emails and access desktop of a backend computer clicking icons on the desktop and launching applications."

Comments

Some other (more useful) comments.

[Randseed]

For what it's worth, I do the same thing sometimes when I'm stuck in traffic at this particular intersection in front of a hotel that provides free 802.11b to their guests. I haven't sniffed the traffic because I'm never there long enough and I don't care either, but I have no doubt that were I to do so I'd get all sorts of juicy cleartext passwords, usernames, network information, and God only knows what else. Oh, and by the way, it also works at my university, which is a major academic institution.

This is because in the interests of usability, these systems do not use WEP. In the case of the university, their security consists of not honoring DHCP requests if the system doesn't know your MAC, and hiding the ESSID. Again, no WEP. I have sat in conferences and watched people checking their email. (That's also good for, how shall we say, 'social intelligence.')

The bottom line is, and always will be, that people need to pay attention to how the technology they use works. If they don't know, then it is to a certain extent their own problem.

To combat this, all my wireless systems, including the ones I use at home, use a VPN to connect to my home router, and then the traffic goes out from there. The VPN uses a cryptographic key for authentication, not a password, and all traffic except for DHCP requests go over it. The best someone can really accomplish at the network level is to bump me off the network, at which point the VPN falls over too, and no data is compromised. The system at home also uses WEP, and requires that all machines connecting over wireless use a VPN to get routed from the router to, well, anywhere, even the LAN.

"But what about after the data leaves your cable modem at home?" That's a valid concern. So any data that I'm really concerned about is encrypted going out of there too. The catch is that, of course, I can't do that all the time, and it could still give someone a lot of intelligence by monitoring the traffic. At that point, though, I have a legitimate beef with the cable company, just as users who plug their computer into a hotel ethernet port (not wireless) have a beef with the hotel if someone in the adjacent room sniffs their traffic.

The sad reality is that most people have absolutely no data security at all. Often times, they give themselves the illusion of security by doing something like using some snake-oil crypto product on their Windows machine, which is still clearly open to a number of software-based attacks. And, of course, if you compromise the hardware, nothing is going to save your ass.

Sitting at home, I see six wireless networks. One of them is mine. Four of them don't have any indication of whose they are, so they get a bit of security through obscurity in terms of someone trying to attack them directly. Nevertheless, three of the four are insecure, and the fourth uses only WEP. Of those three unsecured networks, they're broadcasting all sorts of crap in the clear, and two of the three are ridden with spyware and viruses to the point that I can tell remotely using only passive means.

The last guy got interesting. He removed the confusion about whose network was whose, at least with regard to his, by putting his last name in the SSID. The network is wide open.