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"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).
said it best: "A sucker is born every minute".
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
Well, they would have a really difficult time turning my linux based portable into a zombie.
No kidding - is this article really an ad for Linix and/or MacOS X?
The next time I see a "FreeWiFi" I'll jump on and thank them hardily for moving yet another Windows user even closer to an alternate choice.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Or the bad guy could set a relay with the real internet and get all your passwords, that's why I use SSL in public APs. But even worse, he could emulate (and forward data to) popular sites like Gmail, Yahoo, Ebay and Paypal but without any SSL. Like, a site that looks and acts like Gmail and even has your messages but is in reality a non-encrypted site that acts as a proxy.
Personally, I'd try to gather evidence and report it to the police if I felt they'd do anything worthwhile. The fact that this person's behaviour happens to be driving people towards my OSs of choice is purely incidental. You probably realise this, and I doubt that you were serious about thanking the guy, but I bet that your f****d up zealotry, morality and ideology are genuine; you really would place a microscopic (and questionable) "blow" against Microsoft over thieving scum like this escaping justice. You really think that MS-enabled crime (let alone this particular scam) is the only crime they're going to commit?
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How sure are you that you can prove that you're not involved, especially when you've been arrested and subject to police questioning? Under ideal circumstances If you were in control of things, you could probably put together a good case, but fancy playing against a prosecutor and police who genuinely believe that you were involved and want to make you look bad?
And (so the police will want to know) since you obviously knew this guy was up to no good, why didn't you report it?
Doesn't sound such a good idea now.
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Okay, but tell me - how often do you regularly see firefox warnings about certificates signed by random CAs? I see at least one or two a week. How likely do you think it is that someone's going to notice this?
When even Google AdSense can't get the whole "do https properly so that people don't get trained to click past error messages" thing right (granted, it's a different error in google's case), how closely are people really going to look? Granted, they might get slightly suspicious the third of fourth time this happened, but for people just trying to check some news sites and their corporate email before boarding they might only see one such error message.
Situation's a bit different in Europe. The airports in Budapest and Vienna have free wi-fi, and it's blazingly fast. In fact, when I recently had to fly out from Vienna, I got to the airport 36 hours early so I could get several films through Bittorrent.
It's that kind of juvenile behavior that kills off free wi-fi services. They are there for people to check itineraries, keep in touch with their friends/family/colleagues, and other minor conveniences. They don't exist for jackasses to park on for days to download movies.
"Free to use" does not mean "Free to abuse". If you want more bandwidth, pay for it yourself.
This still doesn't explain about the zombification process. First of all, most file sharing is read only unless you have a password used, most home users don't really do much filesharing, but generally it's a read only thing, but second of all even if you have your entire folders mounted as read/write, how exactly does that allow this machine to turn you into a zombie? Last I heard writing files to your my documents folder (it's really difficult to share other folders than this) can not actually execute code.
I guess if your entire hard drive was shared, there is a possibility that they could write the file to a startup directory on it that automatically launches it on your next reboot . . .
This article really read as a lot of FUD to me. Possibly unpatched machines are affected, but they give a solution of disconnecting from the net. I just don't get it, the solution, it appears to me would be to oh, I don't know, patch your computer and use sane practices (like not sharing your whole hard drive as read/write/execute (apparently) with anonymous access).
Now the problem of them being able to steal credit card numbers and such is an issue. This is an issue that effects all OSes, so everyone should think bout it. however, if you check that the ssl keys you accept are valid for the site in question, then you should be alright. While they can perform a man-in-the-middle attack, that does require changing what keys a website uses (or possibly disabling encryption). As far as aim passwords and such go, well if you don't use it for important stuff, what are they going to do with it?
I read this entire article and really just want to read something from someone who knows anything about security, and not some idiot who read about something like this and proposes an even more idiotic solution. There is truth that you must be careful connecting to any wireless network that you don't know, also your machine needs to be patched etc. a little common sense goes a long way in this matter.
Phil
I'd highly prefer MS wise up and fix their OS, but they won't. Ever. They're just not that kind of company, never have been, never will be. On this, I would *love* to be proven wrong by MS's future actions.
I don't see how it's "fucked up zealotry, morality and ideology" to hope people will switch away from such a dreadful and dangerous product. I hope people will stop eating products with high fructose corn syrup and trans-fats. How is there anything wrong with such a position, *whatsoever*?
2) Yes.
3) The user need do nothing. If you have read/write access to C:, you can install anything you want and have it run automatically.
Aside from the jackass component, how about the idiocy? Personally, I'd much rather pay for a few dvds than sit in an airport for 36 hours to get them "free".
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Lots of people will hit yes and continue, cause they really need to log in and download that confidential financial report with all of the account numbers and passwords in it. Then they're hosed.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
And no, they *don't* deserve it. If there was a warning dialog which said, "Doing this might cause you to get pwn3d", you might have a point. The problem is that there's no reason to expect your average user to understand the implications involved.
Every so often, bad weather during the winter leads to a few deaths due to people using charcoal barbecues in the house. It's not reasonable to suggest those people deserve what happened to them. If they didn't understand the risk (and many people don't) they are victims of their own, reasonable ignorance. If the heat is out, your stranded at home in a blizzard, and all you have is a barbecue, what do you think your average person is going to think?
It's the same with many Windows exploits. People use the OS the way its design promotes, and develop habits accordingly (such as blindly clicking "next, next, next" during software installation). Yes, education and vigilance would stop many of the problems, but the level of education and vigilance is above and beyond what is reasonable to expect.
Blaming the user is foolish. Why not fix the OS?