Wireless Security
I thought I’d share this slightly humorous, slightly telling anecdote. I’ll try to keep it brief.
I just moved into a brand new apartment. Unfortunately, my wired internet isn’t going to be installed for another week and a half. Naturally, I turn to wireless (other peoples’ wireless, that is). So I do a quick scan to check out what’s around, and to my surprise, all the networks (minus the municipal one which doesn’t seem to work) had some kind of security, at least WEP.
After making sure that none of the networks were open, I busted out airodump, scanned, and saw only one network with any traffic going over it. This was necessary to get some packets so I could crack the key. I spent 54 minutes and 52 seconds (well, my computer did) sniffing enough packets to break the encryption. Turns out 367,366 IVs did it in this case. In any case, I come over to the computer with glee, seeing the network was cracked, and what do I see?
Wow.
That’s right, the key was found! And it was… 12:34:56:78:9A. Seriously? I sat there for a minute laughing and actually thinking that couldn’t be it. I mean, that’s the equivalent of “password” as a password. I tentatively try to connect with my newly-found WEP key and without a delay, I was connected to the network. Wow.
Lesson learned: try out simple WEP keys before going through the effort of cracking the network. You just might get lucky. I mean, if the person is using WEP anyway, they probably don’t know all that much about security.
Well, you also failed: In conceiling the name of the capture file (and thereby, the ESSID?)
Well I take my *own* security much more seriously.
Not to mention I did some investigation after the fact, and this is the default name and key for a particular brand of router (with a web interface seemingly in Korean…), so its identity isn’t all that unique.
But yes, epic fail, I suppose (and fixed).