Simple Rogue WiFi Hotspot Captures High Profile Data

jones_supa writes Gustav Nipe, president of Sweden's Pirate Party's youth wing, was successful with somewhat trivial social engineering experiment in the area of the Sälen security conference. He set up a WiFi hotspot named "Öppen Gäst" ("Open Guest") without any kind of encryption. What do you know, a large amount of unsuspecting high profile guests associate with the network. Nipe says he was able to track which sites people visited as well as the emails and text messages of around 100 delegates, including politicians and journalists as well as security experts. He says that he won't be revealing which sites were visited by specific experts, as the point was just to draw attention to the issue of rogue network monitoring. The stunt has already sparked criticism in Swedish newspapers and on social media, with some angry comments saying that Nipe breached Sweden's Personal Data Act.

Comments

The danger of open networks

[ruir]

I remember seeing a open network in lots of odd places, like trains, when you had no wifi in trains. It was usually in hadhoc mode. Some time later on I learnt it was a virus in Windows that opened it up to try to propagate to other hosts.

Re:some things for any judge to consider

[Minupla]

An open network connection at a security conference. That's either a honeypot or a freebie.

This. At the security conference I attend (defcon), assuming you got drunk enough to be dumb enough to connect an open hotspot, you'd be thanking your lucky stars if the worst that happened to you was getting on the wall of sheep (which is essentially the same stunt this guy pulled, with the information projected on a wall for everyone to see). I personally VPN *everything* during that week, and if I have to absolutely connect to a work system, I drive to a random McDs outside of the conference and do my VPNing from there (it's usually faster and more reliable then any network at the conference too, since it's not the prize in a big game of Spy vs Spy).

Min