Ask HN: Is Public WiFi Dangerous?

Re:Ask HN: Is Public WiFi Dangerous? by thot_experiment on Friday March 18, 2022 @02:31PM (#30725805)

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. :(

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Re:Ask HN: Is Public WiFi Dangerous? by zoover2020 on Friday March 18, 2022 @02:37PM (#30725874)

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

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Re:Ask HN: Is Public WiFi Dangerous? by joeyrobert on Friday March 18, 2022 @03:02PM (#30726165)

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

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Re:Ask HN: Is Public WiFi Dangerous? by freedomben on Friday March 18, 2022 @07:19PM (#30728897)

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.

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Re:Ask HN: Is Public WiFi Dangerous? by RajT88 on Friday March 18, 2022 @05:03PM (#30727497)

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.

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Re:Ask HN: Is Public WiFi Dangerous? by pabs3 on Friday March 18, 2022 @10:30PM (#30730355)

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

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Re:Ask HN: Is Public WiFi Dangerous? by kodah on Saturday March 19, 2022 @12:39PM (#30735202)

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

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