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August 11, 2008

Wee-Fi: iPhone Penetration, Hotspots Undercounted, Warballoon, Cincy Bus-Fi

By Glenn Fleishman

iPhone sleeper cell: Security researchers demonstrated the use of an iPhone with an external battery pack as a method of sniffing networks from a mailroom, to find information that a business might not feel that it has to secure in the heart of its operations. Errata Security performed distant penetration testing for a client in this way, and found most of their wireless networks unprotected. This is sort of absurd, and I’ll be curious what Errata posts on their own site about this project—the scope sounds wrong in the reporting on their talk—because every firm of any scale has some kind of encryption on their internal networks. If they don’t, you have concerns at a much higher level than penetration testing.

Four chains, four Wi-Fi pay policies: CIO magazine looks at Borders, McDonald’s, Panera, and Starbucks, and how they’re offering Wi-Fi. I’d like to suggest you read this article, but the author writes, “Right now, according to Hotspot Locations, there are more than 33,000 WLAN hotspots worldwide, and more than 10,000 in the United States alone.” I don’t know who “Hotspot Locations” is, and I need to disclose that I have a financial interest in what must be their competitor, JiWire, but any hotspot finder that calls them “WLAN Hotspots” and reports 11,712 in the U.S. and 33,106 worldwide just isn’t working very hard. JiWire lists over 230,000 hotspots worldwide, and notes over 60,000 in the U.S., while Boingo and iPass each resell access to over 100,000 hotspots worldwide.

Up, up, and away in my beautiful, my beautiful warballoon: Defcon hackers deployed a balloon with Wi-Fi receivers on it 150 feet in the air to scan for network vulnerabilities in Las Vegas last week. They found 1/3rd of networks had no encryption—although I always wonder if they’re using passive scanning where 802.1X allows a limited connection for authentication and appears “open” in some ways, or if they were actively scanning, in which case 802.1X networks would be unavailable.

Cincinnati Metro service has Wi-Fi on 20 buses: The free service supplied by AT&T in an ads-for-access deal with the authority was placed after a couple years of testing on a relatively long commuter run. The authority spends $15,000 per bus to setup a connection, which seems rather pricey. Other authorities are paying in the low thousands, from what I’ve seen, so I’m not sure what their particular case is. Update: Good news. The $15,000 was a typo; it’s $1,500 per system. And AT&T isn’t supplying the service; rather, they’re paying for ads, and supplying the cellular backhaul. HarborLink Networks is actually providing the system.

Posted by Glennf at August 11, 2008 9:49 AM

Categories: Wee-Fi

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