The early 2000's were a real good time. Default passwords on everything, plain HTTP. In high school I did a MITM on a coffee shop because their router had the default credentials and just had a great time watching everyone else's browsing. My dad blocked battle.net AND found the keylogger I put on his computer to recover the router password to unblock it (though he was impressed enough by my attempt that he didn't ground me) which resulted in my first foray into linux (shouts to BackTrack) so I could crack the neighbors WEP.

Once I figured out packet injection (before cellphones) I actually cracked some random company WEP in a parking lot when my friends and I got lost in order to look up directions.

Nowadays things are a lot less fun. :(

Oh boy, bring me back to the WEP-cracking Backtrack days as a kid.

I remember buying a network adapter with packet injection capabilities SPECIFICALLY for this haha

While I didn't do this myself, I remember watching Kevin Rose do this on his internet show thebroken. He talks about getting an orinoco PCMCIA wifi adapter because of their broad support for this kind of thing. If you want a blast from the past, you can watch them here: https://archive.org/details/thebroken_xvid

Oh man yeah, good time. The 90s were even better (I remember when nearly every SMTP server was an open relay, and every company used smtp.example.com so you could easily guess the hostname), although the world was so much less connected. The early 2000s everybody was getting computers so even though some tricks weren't easy anymore, there was an abundance of juice.

There is still a lot of fun to be had!

Driver support for packet injection in Kali Linux is fantastic now, making it easy to spray de-auth packets with most hardware and capture your auth packets without having to wait.

I tested out Hashcat recently with my GTX 1060 (a modest card), and could burn through 170k WPA2 hashes a second. That's a long way from brute force, but doable for most wordlist attacks.

Are the driver support for packet injection upstream now? ie can one do this on normal distros not just Kali?

If you have an antheros card (which is quite popular) then they've been upstream in mainline with permiscuous mode for an eternity.

> When I was a kid (in the early 2000's) it was exceptionally easy to crack public wifi networks

But you're not a kid anymore and nowadays it's way harder to crack public wifi networks.

Fearmongering by VPN vendors is very real.

I wouldn't have a problem browsing my home banking on a public wifi network. Everything is tls-encrypted, my browser can do dns-over-https, and anything important (including the login) requires me to enter an one-time code from my non-smart token.

And by the way, on a public wifi you might be pray of the occasional wifi attacker where as if you're using a vpn from a vpn vendor you're by definition giving all your traffic to a company whose main specialty is networking, usually under the vague promise not to log your traffic.

Not sure why you're so downvoted. Everything you state is correct and the person you are responding to brought up completely irrelevant things. VPN companies really do use fear tactics to sell their products.

Not to detract from your overall point, but a one-time code wouldn't protect you from mitm.

TLS/HTTPS was also far less common in the early 2000s. It's so prevalent these days that unencrypted wifi connections really don't matter anymore. Computers are talking to remote servers over encrypted connections regardless of the presence or absence of wifi-level encryption.

A related factor was responsibility shirking: some companies tried to claim that the problem for their lack of authentication / encryption was a problem with WiFi. I gave a few talks back then pushing what's now termed zero trust and you could just see the instinctive rejection from the telecom guys who were used to thinking of security as a function of the physical environment. That got criticism at the time, of course, but it really became untenable after so many malware attacks finally got the point through that you could not possibly rely on trusting the network layer.

Also things like Firesheep were pretty high profile back in the days

> it was exceptionally easy to crack public wifi networks

This may be because public wifi networks are public, which means they're open, which means there's no wifi password or encryption. Cracking a public wifi network takes all the effort of merely joining the wireless network with a mobile device.

For the few years in college I was living off campus, I never paid for internet at all. Cracking WEP was that easy.

I used this to get internet in my first apartment: https://www.whatsmyip.org/lib/fios-wep-key-calculator/

Just checked my (old, not-used-anymore) Fios network name and there was the original password! Keeping the default password is never a good idea.