endellion.me.uk My Rogue Wireless Access Point (page 3)
Poppy
Poppy is clearly not fanatical about TCP/IP. She could not care less about stupid windows boxes with "network setttings" in them. Poppy tried for weeks to use the Access Point, but failed. Whilst she was given an IP address by our router, she was set to obtain DNS from either ntl (no doubt her previous ISP) or 192.168.2.1 (no doubt she used to use a Belkin router), and of course this wasn't happening at all. Hence no browsing for Poppy. But she was filling my logs quite considerably with continual DNS queries, so I decided to let my router impersonate a Belkin router as well. This is quite easy with ClarkConnect, just add a virtual IP, and hey presto.
Poppy never even wondered how come it's working now? But brazenly browsed forth in the World Wild Web. A lesson is to be learnt here. I'm not quite sure what, but there sure is. Something to do with awareness and security? It's a bit like giving driving licences out to people who haven't the foggiest notion of why the oil warning light has come on (a week ago, honestly), much less how an engine works. Oops, they already do that.
Talking about security. Poppy uses Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! quite sensibly does authentication under cover of secure socket layers and all that jazz. So as long as Poppy doesn't use the same password for her myspaz as her yahoo, she should be ok. Password-wise, that is. But of course I don't need her password to see her inbox: here it is. Slightly obfuscated for some feeble privacy-related attempt thing. Bearing in mind that anybody who had sat outside the house sniffing away could have seen the same thing.
Quite. I am restricted to the mails she looks at, but then again she does look at all of them, including the spam. And the pages do render quite nicely.
I was tempted to put a list of links out here with all the myspace pages, so you can make one-click friends. But maybe better not. Dunno.
On the topic of anyone else being able to see it, I decided to test this out in the real world. Off I went with laptop and wireless card, and drove around. The weather was absolutely atrocious which made for the best excuse yet to stop every now and again.
The number of people with unsecured access points seems to be steadily declining, but the number of access points with WPA seems to remain the same. An awful lot of WEP is going on out there. My next mission will include the cracking thereof, which is supposed to be so very easy nowadays, but this drive was all about networks without any security at all. I also decided not to do anything that could possibly be construed as unlawful, so I set my wireless card up that it would on no account go round picking up IP addresses anywhere.
Within minutes the packets started streaming in.
Oh, if you've got this far reading, maybe you are genuinely interested in this sort of stuff, so I'll tell you how I set it up. The laptop runs Ubuntu, I have a PCMCIA wireless card with a Prism2 chipset in it which I set to monitor mode. I ran Wireshark to capture the packets (filter "tcp or udp or icmp" not to be overwhelmed by the literally thousands of beacon frames. Beacon frames are interesting, but there's so bloody many...). Also run airmon which shows you access point names and macs, as well as the macs of computers associated with them. Don't necessarily believe its verdict as to the encryption used: it is adamant that my open AP is WPA. It definitely isn't. Where several macs are associated with an AP it is worth stopping and waiting a while. Oh that rainstorm... Couldn't see out the bleeding windscreen!
At the first stop there is a Belkin router (cunningly named "Belkin") with three computers wirelessly associated. One of them is browsing the web looking for places to stay on holiday. Another is downloading illegal music files through the p2p method. The third seems to be mainly switched on, but not having a human do anything with it.