This applies to home networks, too. If you never bothered to enable security on your wireless router, you're susceptible to the same attacks. Your neighbor could be watching your every click from the privacy of his home.

Yeah and WEP encryption is about the same as hiding your carkeys in the glovebox. Check into WPA encryption.

Wow, pretty unethical to sniff someone's packets on national TV and then confront them about what they were doing, especially as something as personal as unemployment insurance.

Yeah and WEP encryption is about the same as hiding your carkeys in the glovebox.

I keep hearing people put down WEP, but what's so weak about it?

@polarogak: They said in the report that they ware the people in the Cafe before they started to sniff hence no porn searches :)

Oops I meant "WARN" not "ware"...

Also, enable MAC Address filtering on the access point. And for god sakes, change the password on it also.

@timmus: the problem with WEP is the key is sent in the raw, with free software and a laptop. You can have the password in less then 2 mins. Not something I would trust for banking ;)

@timmus: Basically anyone can get software online and crack a WEP key with a relatively low amount of transmissions. There's a decent article on Wiki about it. Also just type something like "cracking WEP" into Google and you can learn plenty.

The video is somewhat misleading.

It's certainly true that unencrypted transmissions in a public WiFi hot spot can be sniffed. But they fail to mention that (duh) all unencrypted transmissions over the internet are subject to interception at dozens of points along the way.

Yes, it's lots easier for a bad guy to intercept packets when they're flying through the air like spittle at a political debate. But that doesn't change the fact that you should never, ever send anything remotely sensitive through the inter-pipes without encryption, and it doesn't matter if you're in a Nigerian internet cafe or in Fort Knox.

A WiFi hot spot also makes it easier for a bad guy to trick you into using his poisoned DNS, which allows him to pass off his fake bank website as the real one. But there's bad guys everywhere, and the video doesn't mention the simple measure that will stop most such attacks:
do not put your password into http://www.your-bank.com. Instead, point your browser to the secure version, at https://www.your-bank.com (note the "s"). If little key thingie in your browser doesn't light up, then you're not connected to the authentic version.

Again, these measures should be taken ALL OF THE TIME, and not just when mooching free internet from the chinese pet-food manufacturer next door.

This segment is very misleading.

They are basically saying that encrypted sites (like your bank's) are as unsafe as non-encrypted sites and that is not true.

You could be tricked into logging on to a bogus site and type your userid and password, but that has nothing to do with the type of connection you are using (wireless encrypted with WEP or WPA, wireless non-encrypted or wired).

Bogus sites are a completely different type of attack (phishing) and it is usually done by sending a fake e-mail asking you to logon to a site you are a member of (eBay, your bank, your credit card company etc).

As usual with TV news, this is just a useless piece of scaremongering. "Do you know your baby can die just by drinking milk??? Details at 11."

@roche: Spoofing a MAC address is fairly trivial. But as others have said, SSL sessions are encrypted already, so unless your bank is moronic, you'll be fine.

Oh my. I am going to go buy some anti-virus protection a firewall and a whole freaking security suite right away!!!!! I dont want somebody getting MY infoz!

Don't forget that packet sniffing can be considered illegal, just like a telephone wire tap.

Did anybody else giggle like a schoolgirl when they saw "Evil Twin" or was it just me?

@Mariallena: Wrong. Traffic on unsecured wireless networks is vulnerable to tampering. Using airpwn, for example, an attacker can inject an arbitrary response to an HTTP request. (Your browser contacts your bank's web server, but it receives a spoofed response from the attacker's computer. No phishing required.)

That evil twin graphic is priceless. he needs a moustache or cape though ... maybe make him a little more hamburglerish.

.....Disabling "ad-hoc" connections is a good start. Better is searching Microsoft.com for, and downloading, the "wireless client" update. Otherwise, your machine is "calling out" all of your preferred network names when you boot it up, trying to connect to those networks. If you seem to have connected to your home network, at a cafe across town, be very suspicious... And hope your C:\ drive isn't shared out!

.....One of the (few) nice things about AOL 9.0 software is that your password is encrypted, so getting your email at a wifi cafe is relatively safe. Not so with Thunderbird or Outlook/OE. At least not by default. You've got to take pains with those clients to set up secure email..

.....Some of my more paranoid friends leave their home desktop on, and set up a secure VPN connection from the laptop at the cafe, effectively surfing from their home connection.

@Holden: A security suite on your computer, while a good idea, isn't going to help at all in this case-it's only monitoring what's happening locally. Sniffing happens between your computer and the wireless access point. If you want to be safe, either make sure you're connect to an AP using WPA (and a minimum 20 character password) for encryption, or wait until you have a wired connection. If you want to be really safe, be sure to check the SSL certificate before submitting any information-it's rare, but SSL is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attack.

@Rajio:

Don't forget the monocle.

@roche:

MAC filtering is useless. A valid MAC can be sniffed and spoof in seconds.

For most people, WPA2 is the best there is. It hasn't been cracked. But WPA2 is useless with an easily guessed password. Long strings of random characters (that includes numbers, letters and symbols) make the best passwords as they're nearly impossible to brute-force.

I'm seeing a lot of inaccurate stuff being posted here, and since I have some practical experience with wireless security, I'm going to clear a few things up.

WEP is bad because it's easily cracked using tools like Aircrack. Even at the older, slower 802.11b speeds, it only takes about 20 minutes of heavy network activity (which can be generated by the attacker even before they've cracked the WEP key, due to another vulnerability in WEP called a "replay attack") to generate enough packets to easily crack the vast majority of WEP keys. It's not 100% guaranteed, but it's well over 99%.

In theory, MAC address filtering is useless. But in practice it can actually slow down an attacker significantly if your network's rarely used, as many home wireless networks are. To spoof a valid MAC address, an attacker needs to sniff a valid MAC address from the network (possible even with WEP, since WEP only encrypts the packet's contents, not the entire packet). If no valid clients are associated with the access point and exchanging packets, there'll be nothing for the attacker to sniff. So, in combination with other security measures, MAC filtering certainly can't hurt.

WPA comes in several flavors, and WPA-PSK ("pre-shared key") is vulnerable to cracking as well. To be really secure you need to use WPA-TKIP, which changes the keys quickly enough that an attacker never has a chance to gather enough packets encrypted with the same key to crack it. But TKIP requires a RADIUS server on your network for authentication, and most home and small office users don't bother to set up such a thing.