WiFi Security (Or lack thereof...)
... I recently filmed six episodes of a new TV series (”It’s All Geek to Me,” which airs in February on The Science Channel, Discovery HD and Discovery Europe). In one of them, I wanted to get to the bottom of this Wi-Fi snooping business. I wanted to see exactly what is, and is not, possible for the bad guys to intercept when you’re sitting there in Starbucks or the hotel lobby.
I put a note up on my blog, seeking a guest who could appear on the show and show me the hacky ropes. I found Jon Baer, a technical consultant who seemed just right for the part.
We met (Jon, the camera crew and I) in a Manhattan Wi-Fi coffee shop. Turns out there was absolutely nothing to it. Jon sat a few feet away with his PowerBook; I fired up my Fujitsu laptop and began doing some e-mail and Web surfing.
That’s all it took. He turned his laptop around to reveal all of this:
* Every copy of every e-mail message I sent *and* received.
* A list of the Web sites I visited.
* Even, incredibly, the graphics that had appeared on the Web sites I had visited.
None of this took any particular effort, hacker skill or fancy software. Anyone could do it. You could do it.
All Jon needed was a “packet sniffing” program; such software is free and widely available. (He used a Mac program called Eavesdrop.) It sniffs the airwaves and displays whatever data it finds being transmitted in the public hot spot.
Now, the fact that it’s so easy to intercept your Internet signals in a public hot spot doesn’t mean that somebody is *doing* it. In fact, of course, most of the time, nobody is.
Nonetheless, Jon’s little demonstration made clear that somebody *could* intercept your transmissions extremely easily....
Read the full post here.
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