Don’t take my words for this, but you need to watch this video to see how dangerous it’s for you to surfing the web, taking care important stuffs such as online banking, and doing all of those urgent things over the wireless connection (safer at home but not hacker proof) through the public Wi-Fi (Internet connection from coffee shops, etc.). Although the technical jargon could throw you into a lala land where everything may seem impossible to understand and so far away, but don’t worry, I’m here to make things a little easier to understand for you (believe me, I had to look some of those technical jargon and concept up many times before).
Here is the deal! Someone at a public spot with an evil intention could own you by redirecting you to whatever websites he/she wants to. This means if you try to visit a bank from a public location using public Internet connection, someone evil could create a fake bank look alike website beforehand, and whenever you request for that specific bank’s IP address (website address, URL), the evildoer could redirect you to the fake bank website. Whatever you type into the fake bank website, the evildoer could then capture anything you type for later perusing.
There are many methods of how an evildoer could go about and setup a trap like this. Here we talk about DHCP exhaustion and then inject the man in the middle attack method to own an Internet traffic. What’s DHCP exhaustion? Basically, it’s a way that an evildoer could request a gateway (router) to give out not one, but many IP addresses to a point that there is no more IP address to give out to the next computer user. Most if not all router could provide DHCP server environment where a router gives out the local IP addresses (192.168.x.x) to the computers; for receiving and having a local IP address from a router (access point, gateway, etc.), a computer is able to access the network and browse the Internet. So why an evildoer wants to max out the local IP addresses that a router (gateway, access point) could give? In doing so the router could not reserve any open spot for a computer user who now wants to log onto the Internet but could not since no local IP address is available to give out. At the same time, the evildoer fires up his own DHCP software/hardware (bad router, bad access point, bad gateway) to intercept your computer’s local network request, and eventually the evildoer allows you to use his/her DHCP server to surf the web — which means the evildoer could redirect you to anywhere on the web he or she wants.
Obviously, to carry out such an attack one requires the necessary tools to do so, but there is no doubt that crackers (hackers – a much popular term but lazy) always equip themselves with evil tools that rock your world. Why using a home network and an office network are safer? It’s because strangers need an access key to access your network, otherwise it’s a no go for strangers who want to hack you. After saying that, it’s not a complete truth and a sincere statement. Why? You know those crackers love to mess with your wireless connection, and trust me they have the tools to break into your network — although not easy, but it’s not impossible. To be even more secure, you could use an Ethernet connection at home, turn off the DHCP server capability in your router, and use only static local IP address. Still, even that, if you’re not careful and not updating your router’s firmware to the latest, a cracker could still exploit the old firmware to find a security hole that he/she could eventually break into your network. Also, don’t ever forget to change the router’s admin user name to something that could not be guess easily, and the password for router’s admin account has to be strong too. Other router’s security extra options that you can make a cracker’s life a little harder by disabling uPnP capability, only allowing known computers’ physical addresses (MAC address) to access the router and Internet, turning on HTTPS web access for admin only, and denying known bad websites that could potentially infect your network with trojans and computer viruses and computer worms.
Check out the technology video which talks about DHCP exhaustion and DNS man in the middle attacks after the break!
