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I knew my day was going too well. This balances it out. Maybe it’s common sense, but I’d never thought of it. CNN has an article about the “Evil Twin” attack. The basic gist is Joe Random takes a wifi point, dumps it on the same channel, and with the same SSID as a public one, but with a boosted signal and more sensitive antenna. No one notices any difference… but all that unencrypted data’s getting logged for Joe Random to dig through later… and the next day, he can move his box somewhere else (or not).
Sure, you can stop this by only connecting to encrypted boxes.. but that’s not going to help most people. Not good, and I can’t really see any fix for it. This sucks, particularly if you’ve put alot of effort into setting up free wifi for your apartment complex like a certain FG editor.
Category: Security
One Response for "WiFi’s Evil Twin"
January 20th, 2005 at 5:49 pm
1Essentially this will probably never be used for anything more than that which anyone running a packet-sniffer in the area can’t accomplish anyways. Nothing too new here. Don’t worry about it. Sans-SSL or encryption the Internet/Wireless is essentially always insecure.
Still, nothing quite as fun as going to a free wifi hotspot with a packetsniffer eavesdropping on AIM conversations or harvesting the local university students’ account passwords. Not that I would ever do something like that.
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