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Firesheep Countermeasure Tool BlackSheep
Orome1 writes "Slashdot already covered Firesheep, the Firefox extension that makes it easier to steal logins and take over social media and email accounts after users log in from a WiFi hotspot or even their own unprotected network. Zscaler researchers have created, and are now offering to every consumer, a free Firefox plugin called BlackSheep, which serves as a counter-measure. BlackSheep combats Firesheep by monitoring traffic and then alerting users if Firesheep is being used on the network. BlackSheep does this by dropping 'fake' session ID information on the wire and then monitors traffic to see if it has been hijacked."
Or you could just force tls/ssl on sites that support it and render firesheep useless. Because you know, being alerted that your information just got stolen is much better than using proper security in the first place.... or not.
Get a web developer
shouldn't it be called Firefox?
Oh wait...
Don't most big email and social network sites use a secure login, so that it won't work for firesheep? Are there any examples of large ones that don't? Thanks.
Since this extension only *informs* and does nothing else, such as actively disrupt Firesheep's functionality, you will still be busted if doing insecure communication on the network, see this warning suddenly pop up, and are already using Twitter/Facebook/...? And in this case, you would have to "ZOMGQUIT!!!" to have any chance of being safe.
For how long can a session be hijacked anyway? If you close your browser, is the seesion instantly invalidated? Or only after like 5 minutes? I mean, in that case, Blacksheep could scream all it wants, and you'll still be a potential victim even if it warned you and you closed your browser (or tab).
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
See also: Sheepsafe. http://github.com/nicksieger/sheepsafe ... it's a simple Ruby script that automates setting up a SOCKS proxy for you on untrusted networks. I think it's only setup to work w/ OSX right now, but should be pretty simple to adapt to other unixy OSes.
The truth is, unless you're someone who matters, nobody cares about your rambling on your blog, your Facebook account or your Facebook friends, what you tweet about, your nickserv password on IRC or your POP3 email password. Nobody... cares...
A half a million downloads of firesheep says you are wrong.
So in short, if you're a harmless Joe Blow, you can stop worrying about securing your digital presence: it only makes you look suspect if your computer or your communications are investigated for any reason. Your place in the Who's Nobody pretty much ensures your security and anonymity on the internet.
People thinking this, or not worrying about password sniffing in other forms, all make one crucial wrong assumption, and it's that protecting your account is often not about protecting the information you chose to publish.
Once someone has access to your account either by password sniffing or session hijacking can act as you, spamming your contacts and perhaps sending them off to sites that perform drive-by malware installs by posting links as if they had come from you.
While you might be right that nobody cares specifically about one person's facebook account, there are certainly people out there who would love to pick up a large number of them for spamming purposes.
Also for people who are daft enough to use the same password for multiple sites (actually I have one password for sites I don't care about, but for anything else I have separate passwords stored in keepass) sniffing their facebook/twitter/what-ever password could be far worse than getting their social networking account hijacked: it could give an attacker access to your webmail account from which they may be able purloin enough data to gain access to your bank account and so forth.
Begun, the sheep wars have.
This firefox extension from the EFF will force an HTTPS connection if possible. It works with Firefox (ie keeps the connection in https mode throughout the session, not just during the login).
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
- http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=10096
You forget the '4chan' part of the problem. They will use this to ruin your (however unimportant you think it is) life and just for giggles.
How long until Firesheep implements something that detects a Blacksheep trap, and doesn't respond to it? Will Blacksheep then implement a detection detector?
People like you make two crucial assumptions; both wrong:
1. Attacks are laborious: As spam demonstrates, evil can be automated. Thanks to automation, the effort required is so low that the number of rationally viable targets balloons enormously. Further, because security people and mail admins are constantly working against automated evil, the value of genuine "civilian" hosts/accounts/etc. from which to disguise hostile action is higher than it would otherwise be(a single mailserver on a 1Gb line can send more p3n1s p1llz spam, and is much easier to administer, than a huge number of home computers or hijacked hotmail accounts; but costs more and is easier to block).
2. Humans are not, in a substantial number of cases, motivated purely by curiosity, voyeurism, or malice: People break into stuff merely because they can, or because they are hoping to access some of those private pictures from the blond across the coffee shop's account, or because they think that it would be hilarious to have you post "L0L shittingniggerdicks!!!!" to the facebook walls of all your friends and then leave you to explain that one to the dean.
Let's say you have a house. You keep valuable things in it, but you don't have a front door. Anyone can just walk in.
In particular, you've regularly noticed shifty-looking people entering your house carrying a large black bag in order to steal your stuff.
Now from this, you might draw the conclusion that it is time to get a door and lock it.
Or you could set up a sophisticated system of cameras and image analyzing software that will scan everyone walking down your street and sound a loud alarm if one of them is carrying a large black bag.
For bonus points, overspecialize the system so that it only reacts to black bags, but not green ones.
I'd rather have this blacksheep myself.
Slashdot needs a "+1 Retweet this comment" option...
/.
No, seriously. It's off-topic but I really think insightful comments [like the parent comment] should be given more exposure outside of
I wish I could filter out the annoying Pickens articles...
Yeah, like that Alaskan politician who used a Yahoo email account. :P
But how many of those half a million are look-sees that wind up in the trash?
Mod Me Up. You'll make a grown man cry.
Not because I care enough to use it to try to protect the 'sheep'. But I know that somebody will.
I can't wait to be at Starbucks when a socially awkward 17 year old stands up triumphantly to save the day by alerting everyone that there is a 'Firesheeper' in the building hijacking their cookies!
The only problem being it's not actually an insightful comment, for the reasons given by other posts...
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
That's not much of a tripwire, since your odds of activating it are sorta low.
What about FireShepherd which actively jams Firesheep?
No need to worry folks, the FireSheep guys will come up with SheepDog which will make sure that BlackSheep stays the hell put dagnabbit and you'll be able to spy on your friends again in no time.
~Syberz
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0779982/
LMAO
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Sheep Wars
BlackSheep is not a counter-measure, it doesn't attack Firesheep. It is only a detector.
1) I can sniff and use the credentials later. Matter of fact, I would _only_ do that as I _know_ the other guy is active atm.
2) It tells you if you are being sniffed after the fact
3) Use a VPN while on public, shared networks. Always.