Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Chaos
But yeah, wifi is getting... Everywhere nowadays. It's quite nice. ;D
|
And unfortunately, so is the fraud.
There are now hundreds of cases (maybe thousands, but hundreds are publically reported) of people sitting in wifi hotspots masquerading as the "official" location hotspot, but are actually a maliscious proxy... so all of your wireless traffic goes through them, and is proxied through the "real" access point. Meanwhile, they are capturing every single byte you send through the "hotspot", including the traffic of the other dozen people in the coffee shop with you (or on the same flight, in this case).
Basically a high-tech man-in-the-middle attack, and you'll never even know, because you associate with a public hotspot via name, and there's no easy way to tell that someone else has hijacked that name and is sitting in-between your laptop/wifi device and the hotspot access point.
This attack was demonstrated 2 years ago at a
BlackHat conference. Basically everyone wanting to get outside from the show floor, was having their graphics for every webpage they wanted to visit, replaced by the goatse.cx image. The content remained the same, but the graphics were changed.
What we really need is something like a keyed PKI for publically-accessible hotspots.
NoCatNet is a step closer, but there's still no easy way to tell that the AP isn't "official", unless you can authorize it with your private key against its public key.
This kind of stuff sickens me.. it wasn't even 2 days after the tsunami that killed over 160,000 people, that the email spam/fraud was coming through asking for donations.
Thousands of people were misled into donating lots of money to "fake" organizations set up by spammers and fraudulent people.. and they'll never see that money again.
"So many idiots, so few bullets"