Firefox Extension Makes Social-Network ID Spoofing Trivial

Posted by timothy on Monday October 25, 2010 @12:06AM from the plausible-deniability-for-farmville dept.

Orome1 writes "A simple-to-use Firefox plugin presented yesterday at Toorcon in San Diego has hit the security world with the realization that squabbles about Facebook's changing privacy settings and various privacy breaches simply miss the point. 'When it comes to user privacy, SSL is the elephant in the room,' said Eric Butler, the developer of the extension in question, dubbed Firesheep. By installing and running it, anyone can 'sniff out' the unencrypted HTTP sessions currently allowing users on that network segment to access social networks, online services and other website requiring a login, and simply hijack them and impersonate the user."

1 of 185 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Promiscuous mode on any adapter? by SpinningCone · 2010-10-25 00:38 · Score: 5, Interesting

I used to do sniffing and stuff like this a couple years ago and the biggest hurdle was finding a wireless adapter which would allow promiscuous mode. aircrack sells one that comes with 1st party drivers to allow sniffing. I used a linksys usb adapter since there were 3rd party drivers that allowed it.
unless something has changed I thought most wireless driver didn't support promiscuous mode for sniffing.