Big Vulnerability In Hotel Wi-Fi Router Puts Guests At Risk

An anonymous reader writes Guests at hundreds of hotels around the world are susceptible to serious hacks because of routers that many hotel chains depend on for their Wi-Fi networks. Researchers have discovered a vulnerability in the systems, which would allow an attacker to distribute malware to guests, monitor and record data sent over the network, and even possibly gain access to the hotel's reservation and keycard systems. The vulnerability, which was discovered by Justin W. Clarke of the security firm Cylance, gives attackers read-write access to the root file system of the ANTlabs devices. The discovery of the vulnerable systems was particularly interesting to them in light of an active hotel hacking campaign uncovered last year by researchers at Kaspersky Lab. In that campaign, which Kaspersky dubbed DarkHotel.

Comments

And?

[ledow]

Hotel wireless is already a risk anyway.

Let's assume the wireless is open. Then anyone and everyone in an adjoining room can sniff everything you do over it anyway.

Let's assume that you are given the key to join the network. Anyone else who has the same key - same thing. AP isolation doesn't save you against someone recording your traffic and having access to the key used to encrypt it.

Wireless is UNTRUSTED. Even wired is UNTRUSTED. You do not know who's pushing that Facebook DNS entry to you, nor that the Facebook TLS is properly signed if you can't rely on the DNS entry.

When you're not using your own networks, use a VPN. That way you don't even have to care if someone bothered to put even WEP on the connection - the VPN gives you the security for your data. However, be sure that if you're doing this, you have a firewall (you are STUPID if you don't) as anything else can send you traffic in these instances too, no encryption, WEP, WPA, WPA2, it doesn't matter.

Every time someone says "join my wireless", replace it mentally with "just plug this cable that connects to all my local machines and also every guest that's ever had the same offer, into your laptop".

Firewall it. VPN it. Then you don't even need to care that it's an open network. And, shockingly, the same config will work with cabled networks.

And if it doesn't work? You don't want to use that connection. Any hotel that breaks your VPN is one that's almost certainly providing some poor replacement for it.

Re:Cookie authenticated or open WiFi is insecure?

[CaptSisko]

An encrypted VPN might not help you in this case. Most hotel WiFi setups require you to go through a landing page first (captive portal), before internet access is released. This would still expose you to the same vulnerabilities.