Sodium
Premium
join:2003-12-02
Rice Lake, WI
|  reply to DaDogs
Re: A few bad apples...
Intercepting 802.11b data streams is not illegal per se, but once you logon to a network without that network administrator's permission you are breaking the law! The safest way to go wardriving is to disable the TCP/IP protocol and just log the access points on a map. I have had my laptop repossessed by the police for wardriving (long story, but essentially a friend got caught being stupid and I lost my laptop for a few days. I only used it because broadband is unavailable in the rural area where I live and I was leeching from rich people in the wee hours of the morning  ).
The idea you propose is interesting. It reminds me of a worm written by a whitehat hacker to patch I believe the NIMDA or CODE RED worm that attacked SQL servers. Anyway the worm did patch the code on the vulnerable machines it found, but it was a worm nonetheless and its method of propagation no different than the blackhat version. The effect? Thousands of logjammed servers getting DOS flooded by the whitehat version trying to propagate itself.
Aside from the fact of being very illegal, the fact remains that if the people weren't intelligent enough to set a WEP key right off the bat, then how would they know what is going on once their computers that are connected wirelessly suddenly stop connecting to the internet? They will spend a few hours on the phone with tech support until they reset the router back to its default settings of open wireless, and then you will be back to where you started from.
I believe the best solution would be to get rid of WEP immediately (WEP is totally open to bruteforce attacks on its encryption, no matter what the keylength) and either patch WAP (WAP is open to the MICHAEL vulnerability which will shut down the AP if flooded with packets) or come up with a new standard. In the meantime, manufacturers should be required to provide firmware upgrades to WEP-only routers that both require WEP encryption and require the change of password every so often to prevent brute-forcing the keys. Unfortunately, like most critical vulnerabilities, the damage has already been done and it would be very difficult to upgrade even half of the routers out there with built-in WEP because the firmware upgrade would have to be done voluntarily by the end-user. And now we are back to where we started, are we not?  |
