Researchers Say Wi-Fi Virus Outbreak Possible

alphadogg writes with a link to a NetworkWorld article about a troubling security scenario. Indiana University IT researchers are now saying that a WiFi attack intended to piggyback across unsecured access points could do serious damage in a city like Chicago or New York. By essentially brute-forcing the passwords on insecure routers, a worm-like firmware agent could be introduced to an estimated 20,000 networks in New York City alone. "Although the researchers did not develop any attack code that would be used to carry out this infection, they believe it would be possible to write code that guessed default passwords by first entering the default administrative passwords that shipped with the router, and then by trying a list of one million commonly used passwords, one after the other. They believe that 36% of passwords can be guessed using this technique."

Only 36%?

[Odin_Tiger]

36% seems like a severe lowball estimate, to me. I wouldn't be at all surprised if 1/3 of WAP's still have the manufacturer's default admin login.

Re:Only 36%?

[j.sanchez1]

36% seems like a severe lowball estimate, to me. I wouldn't be at all surprised if 1/3 of WAP's still have the manufacturer's default admin login.

1/3 is 33 1/3%. How is that severly off of the 36% estimate?

troubling security scenario?

[Facetious]

Holy crap! Maybe we should deal with existing security problems before we start with the imaginary ones.

Varying router models and revisions

[Dan East]

How many router models and hardware revisions would the worm need to support to make this effective? It would take a great deal of resources to produce custom firmware for that many devices and hardware revisions, especially considering that people have been trying to produce custom firmware for specific devices for a long time without any success at all.

On another note, configuring the router for administrative access only via ethernet would completely stop the problem.

Dan East

Re:Only 36%?

[morgan_greywolf]

I think grandparent is saying that he thinks that more than an additional 3% could be guessed from the list of a million commonly-used passwords. He could be right.

Re:1 million passwords?

[crow]

They don't need to hold the dictionary. Anything that doesn't fit can be downloaded on demand. Most access points have access to the Internet, and residential access points are almost always outside of any firewall (they're usually the firewall themselves).

Re:Really?

[schnikies79]

Even if that is true, if remote management is not enabled, it doesn't matter if you have the password.

I know it was that way on my linksys.

Common Sense Should Prevent This

[j.sanchez1]

I have a Linksys WRT54GL flashed with DD-WRT firmware. I use a MAC filter that only allows computers I SPECIFICALLY tell it to, I have disabled administrative access to the router wirelessly and changed the default login AND password, and I password protect my wireless access on top of all that. It took me about an hour (if I recall correctly) to set the router up, including flashing the DD-WRT firmware on it. But once it is done, I don't have to bother changing any more settings, aside from rotating the admin password and updated the MAC filter as needed.

Just my take on it.

Re:Varying router models and revisions

[David_W]

Would covering the router ports with a note that indicates a required login to set it up be out of the question here?

They are getting there. A Linksys I recently picked up had a label over the ports reminding you to RUN CD FIRST. I'm assuming their CD will do things like change passwords and turn on encryption (wouldn't know since I prefer to do that manually).

Re:Question...

[nevurthls]

I'm not sure if your post is serious as these questions have been answered many times in slashdot. Hiding your ESSID, not using DHCP and using MAC address filtering are insufficient in adding security as they are all part of any exchange between the router and wireless connections. The MAC address of existing machines can be found and copied in seconds. The ESSID and IP address can be found very easily as well. Hacking WEP encryption is also trivial. As a security measure, all these are completely pointless, and do not add anything in terms of security. Hiding your ESSID does decrease your wireless performance. The only security measure that has any real effect in protecting your wireless network from people who really want to get in is using secure encryption. (WPA, etc.)

Re:Question...

[mlts]

The trick with wireless security is to segment it into independant layers.

First, the router providing the wireless AP access should not be the same router firewalling your LAN from the rest of the Internet. This keeps "management" ports that might accidently be open from being Internet accessible. This is hard sometimes. One router I have has two connections to my little LAN, one from one of its machine ports, and one from its "internet" port. This allows it to check for firmware upgrades and whatnot, letting it think its connected to the Net.

Second, if WEP is all you got [1], put the wireless AP on its own network segment, and have the only way in via a hardened machine with a PPTP/L2TP port and a good username and secure password, secure password being preferably over 30 characters. Then, when (not if) someone does bag the wireless key and hops on the network, they will not obtain much in the way of access. If you can't firewall off your WEP AP, nor are able to replace it, consider making it a daily or weekly item in your schedule to change the WEP key.

I personally avoid the fluff of not broadcasting the SSID, but I do use MAC address protection because its another lock on the front door, and once set up, it really takes little administrative work.

[1]: Only use WEP as a *last resort*. Any router made since 2006 (from what I know) *has* to support WPA-PSK and WPA2-PSK (because WPA and WPA2 are part of the 802.11i spec), so if you can, buy a replacement access point from a CompUSA closeout or something similar and use that. Use a decent (12+ chars) for the router's admin account, and have KeePass generate a 63 character WPA/WPA2 key. I personally generate a 63 char key from KeePass, paste it into the router's config. Then, I copy the key's text into a file on a USB flash disk, carry that to all the machines which use the wireless AP, and paste it in their configs. I have my router set to only allow WPA2 and deny WPA, as all my wireless devices understand AES, but other people may need both WPA and WPA2 available.

Of course, just to be safe, consider changing the WPA/WPA2 key every so often (I've heard monthly to six months.)