Question about Peer-to-peer wifi

Grimmda

2[H]4U
Joined
Jul 1, 2003
Messages
3,130
So I'm at work, doing some testing on some laptops and upon bootup of one of them I see XP telling me theres a wireless network to connect to.

My company is not friendly to wireless networking yet (parnoid financial institution), so I drop net stumbler on it, grab the Data Security manager and go "War Walking" to find it. We track down a contractor's laptop in a cuby hole office and verify it's definately his laptop and shut his wifi off and BAM, no more broadcasting.

The wierd thing is the SSID was "Free Public Wifi". So we find the contractor and notify him of this and he's completely unknowledgeable about it. He's a mid 50's guy that works with mainframes, but was using a recent model dell laptop with built in wireless.

I'm fairly confident he wasn't doing this intentional but my Data Security manager just says "keep it off when you're on-site please" and calls it done.

Can someone else explain this to me? Could his laptop somehow been hijacked into doing that sort of thing? And for what purpose? I'll answer any additional questions to detail I can on the matter to someone more "expert" than me with wireless security.
 
So I'm at work, doing some testing on some laptops and upon bootup of one of them I see XP telling me theres a wireless network to connect to.

My company is not friendly to wireless networking yet (parnoid financial institution), so I drop net stumbler on it, grab the Data Security manager and go "War Walking" to find it. We track down a contractor's laptop in a cuby hole office and verify it's definately his laptop and shut his wifi off and BAM, no more broadcasting.

The wierd thing is the SSID was "Free Public Wifi". So we find the contractor and notify him of this and he's completely unknowledgeable about it. He's a mid 50's guy that works with mainframes, but was using a recent model dell laptop with build in wireless.

I'm fairly confident he wasn't doing this intentional but my Data Security manager just says "keep it off when you're on-site please" and calls it done.

Can someone else plain this to me? Could his laptop somehow been hijacked into doing that sort of thing? And for what purpose? I'll answer any additional questions to detail I can on the matter to someone more "expert" than me with wireless security.

Sounded like he was at some convention or conference where someone could have set-up ad-hoc wireless connection and he wanted to connect to it. I've seen this at some convention (a microsoft one). It could be why it's broadcasting. Otherwise, I haven't heard of any malware/spyware program designed to do this. It's possible, just haven't heard of any.
 
If there is a PHYSICAL switch to turn off the WIFI then use it.

It was proberbly another enployee using it as a bridge so they didn't have to stay wired or it could be transmitting to another wireless device using your bandwith for Torrenting.
 
We shut it off. One of the security engineers tried connecting to it but couldn't get an IP. He wasn't even connected to our network so there was no leeching going on. I guess no one here is black hat enough to know. (Or hasn't read this thread yet)
 
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