Researchers Say Wi-Fi Virus Outbreak Possible

alphadogg writes with a link to a NetworkWorld article about a troubling security scenario. Indiana University IT researchers are now saying that a WiFi attack intended to piggyback across unsecured access points could do serious damage in a city like Chicago or New York. By essentially brute-forcing the passwords on insecure routers, a worm-like firmware agent could be introduced to an estimated 20,000 networks in New York City alone. "Although the researchers did not develop any attack code that would be used to carry out this infection, they believe it would be possible to write code that guessed default passwords by first entering the default administrative passwords that shipped with the router, and then by trying a list of one million commonly used passwords, one after the other. They believe that 36% of passwords can be guessed using this technique."

Comments

They'll never get me!

[morgan_greywolf]

Ha! They'll never guess my router admin password, which is '5l@$hd0t.!st.ps0t!'

troubling security scenario?

[Facetious]

Holy crap! Maybe we should deal with existing security problems before we start with the imaginary ones.

Varying router models and revisions

[Dan East]

How many router models and hardware revisions would the worm need to support to make this effective? It would take a great deal of resources to produce custom firmware for that many devices and hardware revisions, especially considering that people have been trying to produce custom firmware for specific devices for a long time without any success at all.

On another note, configuring the router for administrative access only via ethernet would completely stop the problem.

Dan East

Re:Varying router models and revisions

[David_W]

Would covering the router ports with a note that indicates a required login to set it up be out of the question here?

They are getting there. A Linksys I recently picked up had a label over the ports reminding you to RUN CD FIRST. I'm assuming their CD will do things like change passwords and turn on encryption (wouldn't know since I prefer to do that manually).

Really?

[MyDixieWrecked]

I'm not so familiar with Belkin, Netgear and all no-name wireless routers out there, but the newer (last year or two) Linksys WRT54G routers don't allow administrative access over the WLAN by default. You simply get an access denied page when attempting to access it. I'm kind of surprised that linksys doesn't just deny wireless connections to the administrator pages.

Unfortunately, that means that I can no longer log in to those routers with default passwords and open up ports for myself when I'm on some stranger's network and it requires me to plug in when I need to make changes on my own networks.

Of course, you should disable access to the administrator pages over the WLAN (or restrict it to a maintenance port if your router has one), change your administrator password (and username, if possible) and make sure you've got strong encryption with a strong password/key.

When I was living in manhattan (2004-2005), there were over 20 visible wireless access points from my apartment. Running kismet and walking from the front to the back of my apartment with my powerbook, I could pick up closer to 30 networks and about 3/4 of them were password protected; mostly with WEP. Nowadays, living in brooklyn, I can pick up around 15 wireless networks and all but 2 are password protected and most are using WPA or WPA2.

Re:1 million passwords?

[crow]

They don't need to hold the dictionary. Anything that doesn't fit can be downloaded on demand. Most access points have access to the Internet, and residential access points are almost always outside of any firewall (they're usually the firewall themselves).

Church of Wifi already did this

[CounterZer0]

Church of Wifi has a hacked firmware-based worm that runs around and replaces firmware on APs, and then looks for other AP's to attack, and propagates itself.
The key to this kind of attack, is that it could be potentially undetectable - how do you know if the linksys firmware was replaced or slightly modified or not?
Another great use, would be to drop TOR endpoints on every single box infected :)

Re:Question...

[nevurthls]

I'm not sure if your post is serious as these questions have been answered many times in slashdot. Hiding your ESSID, not using DHCP and using MAC address filtering are insufficient in adding security as they are all part of any exchange between the router and wireless connections. The MAC address of existing machines can be found and copied in seconds. The ESSID and IP address can be found very easily as well. Hacking WEP encryption is also trivial. As a security measure, all these are completely pointless, and do not add anything in terms of security. Hiding your ESSID does decrease your wireless performance. The only security measure that has any real effect in protecting your wireless network from people who really want to get in is using secure encryption. (WPA, etc.)

It'll activate itself...

[Shotgun]

What happens with this virus spreads itself around, and then takes over a automated weapons manufacturing plant? I'll tell you what happens. It becomes SELF-AWARE. That's what happens. The next thing you know, we'll have governors showing up naked in deserted places and then beating up biker guys for their clothes. We have to stop this NOW!, before someone gets the bright idea of making a TV series about it.

Aaaah!!! We're to late. Run for the hills!!