What happened in Las Vegas in late July does not appear to be staying in Las Vegas.
Sohail Ahmad, senior wireless security researcher at CMEA portfolio company AirTight Networks , recently discovered a large black hole in wireless security protocol that makes any wireless network susceptible to hacking. Ahmad demonstrated this vulnerability at Black Hat Arsenal and DEF CON 18 in late July.
The vulnerability has been dubbed “Hole196” and is named for the page of the IEEE 802.11 Standard (Revision, 2007) where Ahmad found the original reference. Hole196 involves a man-in-the-middle style attack, whereby a hacker inserts himself between a WiFi user and the network to capture all traffic to and from the user in order to compromise private data. After reading a six word sentence on page 196 of the 1200-plus page of the industry’s wireless security protocol specifications, Ahmad realized the common group key used in wireless networks was not immune to spoofing. He was able to send a broadcast packet using the group key over the air to all the wireless devices in his vicinity and redirect their traffic through his own computer. Because the network is being used against itself, there is little detectable evidence. And because the other WiFi client devices (laptops, POS systems, VOIP phones, etc.) assume the hacker’s computer is now the network gateway, the devices redirect all of their secure traffic to that computer and the network access points re-encrypt the traffic with the hacker’s own private key allowing the hacker to read the once private data without cracking the encryption. (more…)
AT&T’s announcement today that they are eliminating unlimited data plans 
