The new face of Wi-Fi, a hacker's dream scenario...
As more and more places are setting up free wi-fi access points to bring in business, more and more people are grabbing wi-fi cards for their laptops and palm devices. Personally, I think the freedom of being able to freely connect to the Internet from the sidewalk very interesting, and I'm definitely enjoying the anonymity of surfing on a system that doesn't track my existence.
But what about modern day hackers, what kinds of benefits are they deriving from this? Well, in the 90's a lot of money was spent on protecting you via hardware and via tracing design patterns. Pretty much every ISP you work with now will give out your home information to the FBI in a second if requested due to you hacking someone over in Europe. There is simply too much of a paper trail with any home connection that you might achieve, even if you use the age old process of tunnelling through multiple intranet clouds, assuming you've already gained access to any. This means physically, you've been nailed down to a physical existence somewhere on earth, something that scares most virtual netphiles to death since they no longer have the privacy of logging off and removing themselves from *dangerous* situations.
Software firewalls are getting pretty prominent in the market as more people disconnect.and find they need more protection than the OS provides (or simply feel better with the increased security). Heck, Costco sells stacks of the new Norton Firewall, and they go through those stacks very quickly each day as people scramble to protect themselves. Hackers have been whacking hardware firewalls for years though, including those protecting some of the most advanced systems on the Internet. Systems where the design is kept so secret that only gentle black box probing is going to get them any information as to where the access points might be. With software they get the added benefit of spending 50 bucks and using a disassembler to learn the secrets of the program, a treasure trove of information on how to get through.
So what am I saying? Wi-fi access points are becoming a haven for hackers. They gain back all of the edge they had before the big push for security. The get anonymity, they get it for free (AOL used to do this for the inititated ;-), they generally get a decent connection, and they get to walk away when things get hot. Most importantly, they regain the ability to slowly probe systems over time, taking small steps, rather than the recent change where hacks need to be planned for months on end.
Note: This article does not apply to all the CSS hackers and script kiddies out there that don't know how to use a disassembler, cause a buffer overrun, or raise their security privs when logged in using a normal guest account. You guys are only prominent in news feeds because of click happy email freaks.