"Free Wi-Fi" Scam In the Wild

DeadlyBattleRobot writes in with a story from Computerworld about a rather simple scam that has been observed in the wild in several US airports. Bad guys set up a computer-to-computer (ad hoc) network and name it "Free Wi-Fi." You join it and, if you have file sharing enabled, your computer becomes a zombie. The perp has set up Internet sharing so you actually get the connectivity you expected, and you are none the wiser. Of course no one reading this would fall for such an elementary con. The article gives detailed instructions on how to make sure your computer doesn't connect automatically to any offered network, and how to tell if an access point is really an ad hoc network (it's harder on Vista).

Comments

Not that hard in Vista

[jfurdell]

When you connect to a network, a little wizard pops up asking you if it's "Home", "Work", or "Public Location". Choose Public Location and sharing will be disabled automatically.

Re:Avoid ad-hoc connections

[Wanker]

Uh, they already use Infrastructure connections. Bummer, eh?

Even worse, their 200mW cards will out-power the real 40mW access points so Windows will prefer to use the attacker's "closer" "access point".

http://www.remote-exploit.org/backtrack.html

Why just ad hoc?

[BubbaFett]

With Linux and the hostap driver I can set up a legitimate access point. Ad hoc isn't a necessary part of this scam, and I don't see how avoiding ad hoc networks will prevent anything.