AirDefense monitors traffic as a sponsor at trade show and produces its regular report of horrors: In a press release not yet posted at its site, AirDefense said that in the most recent Wi-Fi Planet conference run by Jupitermedia, which concluded today in Baltimore, they found instances running of new cracker tools. The intrusion monitoring company noted eight devices running Hotspotter, eight running Airsnarf, and 12 soft APs. (They didn't note whether other intrusion monitoring firms might have been running any instances of these packages to demonstrate the flaws, however.)
Hotspotter uses a Windows XP (pre-service pack 1, apparently) flaw that allows it to force a Windows XP client to reassociate with a laptop running Hotspotter to scan the computer. Soft APs are access points running on a laptop that can be used to the same effect simply by using names identical to existing networks. Airsnarf automates password extraction on networks to which a computer is connected.
The company also found a small host of MAC address spoofs, invalid MAC addresses, and ad hoc networks, while witnessing several denial of service attacks. There was also plenty of unsecured traffic running over the Wi-Fi network among what should have been a fairly sophisticated user base.