The Five Deadly Dangers of Unsecured WiFi Networks

Once hackers have access to your WiFi network, they can readily capture personal and business knowledge. There are two types of WiFi attacks. Passive attacks, where the hacker captures your network traffic, are nearly impossible to detect considering the hacker never joins your network. They can sit silently with their antenna tuned into your network and capture gigabytes of network traffic for off-line analysis at a later moment. Active attacks, where the hacker joins the network, can be the most devastating considering they can launch active attacks into the network and onto your devices on the network.

There are 5 attacks that WiFi hackers can very easily & readily perform on your wireless network with very little effort or expense. The first two are passive attacks, and the last 3 are active attacks. But invent no mistake - all of these attacks can be deadly.

Deadly Attack #1: detail and Password Capture. There are several applications that send your explanation and passwords in clear text by the network. For example, every duration a POP3 mail explanation checks for new e-mail, the explanation name & password are in the clear as part of the documents transfer. Anyone sniffing the network traffic can easily get your e-mail explanation knowledge. Once they have that info, they can access your e-mail explanation at their leisure, monitoring for personal knowledge without leaving a trace. From there, any confidential knowledge they can get from your history just escalates their attack.

Deadly Attack #2: E-mail, IM and Web Site Traffic Capture - It is very easy to monitor and capture all of the e-mail traffic sent by an unsecured wireless network. Since most e-mail is sent in clear-text, and instant messaging is sent in HTML, it’s very simple to capture the traffic and mine the traffic off line for any “interesting” info at a later instance. By monitoring your wireless traffic, all of the HTML details

can be captured & reconstituted as web pages on the hackers PC to see precisely what web sites & substance you are surfing by the wireless network.

Deadly Attack #3: Accessing input on Your PC. Let’s face it, it’s pretty easy to turn file sharing on, and thereupon forget to turn it off when you attach to an open WiFi network. Once file sharing has been left on or the personal firewall is mis-configured, a hacker can readily access you PC and hard drive across the wireless network. Firewalls are additionally easy to mis-configure or turn off, and forget to turn back on. With older versions of Windows (NT, W2K), whether improperly configured, it’s easy prey for a hacker to get in by the network, log-in as a null session and take by your platform.

Deadly Attack #4: Access to the Corporate Network. whether you’re wireless network is connected to a corporate network through a site-to-site VPN, an open wireless network punches a gap through the network, and opens up both sides of the VPN to anyone attaching to the network. Another threat is with improperly configured client VPNs which can be more easily compromised to supply the hacker access through the VPN.

Deadly Attack #5: SPAM and Virus Launching by the Wireless Network. Unsecured Networks supply are an ideal launch point from which hackers can launch SPAM & Virus attacks considering it is very difficult to track the source back to them. From a distance, the SPAMmer can launch the SPAM (from your e-mail detail whether he or she sniffed your e-mail explanation info) without repudiation. When the ISP or FBI tracks down the violator, the trail points to your network, and possibly your e-mail explanation. The liabilities to the owner of the unsecured network are still newly contended battlegrounds for the lawyers.

Hacking open networks isn’t as hard as one may think. See that flash demonstration on the tools hackers use to crack WiFi networks.