With Wireless, Who Can You Trust? No One You'd Never Guess Who Could Be Snooping Linda LeBlanc
Recently, I attended a conference on computer security in another city. While there, I discovered a coffee shop that could loosely be termed an Internet cafe. They had big comfy overstuffed chairs and couches, free wireless Internet access, and the kind of table you used to do your second-grade homework on in your parents' kitchen.
I spent quite a bit of time at this cafe, working on notes from the conference and taking care of responsibilities at the office. I also spent a great deal of time scrutinizing the clientele there and thinking about the likelihood of someone examining packets as they crossed the wireless network.
Examining packets — more commonly called sniffing traffic — is an exercise in simplicity. Download the appropriate software off the Internet, turn it on, configure it to see everything that goes by, and then save it in a file or look at it in real time. In short, it would be possible – and quite easy – for anyone within signal strength range to see everything I was doing over the Internet.
And since signal strength there at the cafe may have been strong enough to carry as far as a city block, the people in the restaurant weren't the only threats. Anyone within that range could have been listening in.
If you were to meet me on the street, you'd see a well-dressed woman — clean-cut, respectable, mid-thirties to forties. It would probably never occur to you that I am capable of sniffing your traffic. After all, I use a Mac, and aren't those for people who can't handle the complexities of the Windows operating system? No one would think twice about the solitary woman editing photos.
But it's a mistake to dismiss me — or anyone who doesn't match that 'hacker' profile — as a non-threat. It is trivial for me to start up my virtual PC and use whatever tool I prefer to capture all the packets floating around above our heads.
Know what's the best part?
I can start it up and let it run while I edit photos, and then go back to my hotel room and reconstruct packet data to look for interesting tidbits like user/password combos, credit card numbers, or other financial data. Web, AIM, e-mail, whatever — as long as it's not encrypted, I'm going to be able to read it. And if it's encrypted with something lame like ROT13, I'll be able to read it anyway.
