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Beware the Airport Wireless
schwit1 writes to tell us that a recent study by a Silicon Valley-based security company shows that black-hats have been ramping up their use of tempting free or unsecured wireless access points in high travel areas like airports and hotels. "According to their study, even the 'secure' networks weren't all too safe. Eighty percent of the private Wi-Fi networks at airports surveyed by Airtight were secured by the aging Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol, which was cracked back in 2001. Almost as many — 77 percent — of the networks they surveyed were actually private, peer-to-peer networks, meaning they weren't official hotspots. Instead, they were running off someone else's computer."
I cracked my own network in minutes using this method. Can someone point me to a less complicated method?
When I need to get into just about any secure network, this hacking multitool is what I use: CB G.Freeman.
It can crack arbitrarily high amounts of encryption when applied to the proper segment of the network. It works very well, often only taking seconds to provide you with the authentication you require. It also can do wonders on conventional locking systems.
Enjoy!
What's the big deal? Why worry about the insecurity of the local wireless network when you're connecting to the Internet... hello, it's insecure!! If your computer isn't secure it doesn't matter whether the local network is or isn't, your computer is still insecure. If you are doing things across the network that you want to keep private and you aren't doing them over SSL/SSH/VPN you are an idiot regardless of whether the local wifi uses WEP, WPA2, or no encryption at all.
And for that matter, you're in a insecure place connecting via some random network. Its just stupid.
But very convenient. You'd be surprised how much Stupid you can get for Convenience.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
What about if the hotspot doesn't actually give the user the real page, but instead phishing page? I doubt many normal users notice that HTTPS isn't on. Or like in the above The Real Hustle video, "for $1 you can get one hour of surfing time, just enter your credit card details" and you probably can guess what happens from there.
While I was at University, there was often someone broadcasting the SSID "UNH-Wireless" in their Memorial Building. The official SSID was just unhwireless. UNH required you to register your MAC before they would forward your packets to the Internet, but the rogue SSID was open. Since the Memorial Building was where all the visitors ended up for lunch after tours, I wonder how many delicious things were intercepted.
(New Hampshire is the one that touches the ocean. The other one is Vermont, which is the one that touches Canadia.)
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
A few years ago, I was at a SANS security course being hosted at the University of Minnesota. One of the tools we were using was Cain & Abel. The people at the university who had set up Wi-Fi for the class of 125 students had done a horrible job, a bunch of Apple Airports, all sharing the same SSID and the same channel, and each performing their own NATing. You'd bounce between APs and get IP collisions as you'd hit someone who already had that IP on the other AP. It was a total joke, and if you were lucky, you'd maybe get 10-20 minutes of working internet before it'd die again. So, I bought a day pass from the Starbucks access point in the lobby downstairs, which was very reliable by comparison. I then remembered I had my little Apple Airport Express in my bag that I carried with me for when I traveled to hotels that didn't have wireless, so I could set up my own network and sit in the bed, rather than at a desk chair. I used that to create an infrastructure wireless access point called "Free Better Internet" and routed all the traffic through my laptop back to the Starbucks AP downstairs. People would get so frustrated using the shoddy supplied internet that they'd try the other SSIDs they'd see in the list. I then turned on Cain & Abel, and within a couple of hours, I had over 700 username & password combinations, and this was in a class where they handed me the tool to do it on the class CD, and we were talking about it! The looks on my classmates faces when I showed them their usernames and passwords were priceless. I was amazed that large research schools weren't even using SSL on their IMAP connections, and I had a ton of AIM and ICQ passwords, not to mention dozens of web site passwords, even my co-worker's password to her World of Warcraft Guild web site! :)
The moral of the story, is that even "smart" people, who know exactly what the risks are, and who know how to use a VPN, will give up a LOT of security in exchange for free internet access!