Conference Attendees Drop Ball on Wi-Fi Security

[HardOCP News]

I have to admit, I am posting this article based solely on the “ahahahhahaha factor.” If you can’t laugh at wireless security experts that do not secure their own wireless devices at a conference about wireless security, then what can you laugh about?

The rather startling finding is the result of two days of WLAN traffic scanning by wireless security vendor AirDefense . On the first two days of the conference, AirDefense monitors found that more than half of the wireless devices on the conference network were vulnerable to two classes of attacks.

 

[dracop]

roflmao

 

[Nemesis999]

One is the "Evil Twin" attack, in which the attacker tricks a victim into wirelessly connecting to a laptop or PDA posing as a legitimate access point or hotspot. The second class was various "Zero Day" attacks, which exploit newly found software flaws, in applications like Internet Explorer, that haven't yet been fixed by the vendor, or patched by the user.

They exaggerate the situation a bit.

The "evil twin" attack... That other computer would still be in the "Internet" domain as far as their device is concerned. It's not like you connect to this other device and suddenly all your security software self-disables.

and apparently not applying non-existent patches now counts as "dropping the ball"?

 

[inotocracy]

Isn't it quite common for wifi at conferences to be unsecured? Every conference I've attended had wide open wifi...