articles tagged with hacking

... but hackers use their offices for more than that: they use their office as a place to think in. And if you're a technology company, their thoughts are your product. So making hackers work in a noisy, distracting environment is like having a paint factory where the air is full of soot.Paul Graham, Great Hackers (Oscon 2004)

Spending a lot of time travelling these days, (to and from Belfast), I was bored on the Heathrow Express and decided to turn on KisMAC on my MacBookPro – Before I knew it, I was participating in some casual ‘Wardriving’ and the results confirmed 52 wireless networks detected in around 15 minutes (across ~14 miles). The scary stats in more detail;

• 19 were completely unsecured
• 24 were WEP encrypted – easy to crack
• leaving 9 with WPA encyprtion
• 23 had the default SSID assigned
• all but 8 used the default channel ‘11’
• only 1 was detected with it’s SSID hidden

Its clear the majority of people seem to be uneducated on the level of security their wireless networks are capable of providing. Generally opting to leave thier box running with the default settings untouched.

Had the train being going slower – I have no doubts KisMAC would have recognised a lot more networks with lower signal strengths.