Warshipping: A Free Raspberry Pi In The Mail Is Not Always A Welcome Gift

Leading edge computer security is veiled in secrecy — a world where novel attacks are sprung on those who do not yet know what they need to protect against. Once certain tactics have played out within cool kids’ circles, they are introduced to the rest of the world. An IBM …read more

Continue reading Warshipping: A Free Raspberry Pi In The Mail Is Not Always A Welcome Gift

is it possibile to check if a specific MAC address is connected to a generic LAN in a specific area?

Let’s consider a tool like airodump-ng: it lets me see the MAC addresses of all the clients connected to a specific LAN I previously decided to analyse -by telling which bssid and channel I wanted to focus on. That’s to say, … Continue reading is it possibile to check if a specific MAC address is connected to a generic LAN in a specific area?

Creepy Wireless Stalking Made Easy

In a slight twist on the august pursuit of warwalking, [Mehdi] took a Raspberry Pi armed with a GPS, WiFi, and a Bluetooth sniffer around Bordeaux with him for six months and logged all the data he could find. The result isn’t entirely surprising, but it’s still a little bit creepy.

If your WiFi sends out probe requests for its home access points, [Mehdi] logged it. If your Bluetooth devices leak information about what they are, [Mehdi] logged it. In the end, he got nearly 30,000 WiFis logged, including 120,000 probes. Each reading is timestamped and geolocated, and [Mehdi] presents …read more

Continue reading Creepy Wireless Stalking Made Easy

WarWalking With The ESP8266

[Steve] needed a tool to diagnose and fix his friend’s and family’s WiFi. A laptop would do, but WiFi modules and tiny OLED displays are cheap now. His solution was to build a War Walker, a tiny handheld device that would listen in WiFi access points, return the signal strength, and monitor the 2.4GHz environment around him.

The War Walker didn’t appear out of a vacuum. It’s based on the WarCollar Dope Scope, a tiny, portable device consisting of an off-the-shelf Chinese OLED display, an ESP8266 module, and a PCB that can charge batteries, provide a serial port, and ties …read more

Continue reading WarWalking With The ESP8266

A Lot Of WiFi Power, A Yagi, And A Sniper’s ‘Scope

Do you remember the early days of consumer wireless networking, a time of open access points with default SSIDs, manufacturer default passwords, Pringle can antennas, and wardriving? Fortunately out-of-the-box device security has moved on in the last couple of decades, but there was a time when most WiFi networks were an open book to any passer-by with a WiFi-equipped laptop or PDA.

The more sophisticated wardrivers used directional antennas, the simplest of which was the abovementioned Pringle can, in which the snack container was repurposed as a resonant horn antenna with a single radiator mounted on an N socket poking …read more

Continue reading A Lot Of WiFi Power, A Yagi, And A Sniper’s ‘Scope

Nexmon Turns Nexus 5 (and RPi3!) Into WiFi Toolkit

Back in the day, when wardriving was still useful (read: before WPA2 was widespread), we used to wander around with a Zaurus in our pocket running Kismet. Today, every cellphone has WiFi and a significantly more powerful processor inside. But alas, the firmware is locked down.

Enter the NexMon project. If you’ve got a Nexus 5 phone with the Broadcom BCM4339 WiFi chipset, you’ve now got a monitor-mode, packet-injecting workhorse in your pocket, and it looks a lot less creepy than that old Zaurus. But more to the point, NexMon is open. If you’d like to get inside what it …read more

Continue reading Nexmon Turns Nexus 5 (and RPi3!) Into WiFi Toolkit