{"id":149,"date":"2014-09-30T17:04:34","date_gmt":"2014-09-30T07:04:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.smevidence.com.au\/?p=149"},"modified":"2014-09-30T17:04:34","modified_gmt":"2014-09-30T07:04:34","slug":"enabling-burglary-through-wifi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.smevidence.com.au\/website\/?p=149","title":{"rendered":"Enabling burglary through WiFi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Something slightly off topic, but an important thought none the less. I recently stayed at a friend’s\u00a0house as they are away on an extended vacation. I cleared the mailbox, put out the bins and made sure the lights were on for a good portion of the night to ward off any burglars who may have been casing the street for potential targets.<\/p>\n

When I settled onto the couch to review the news on my laptop however, I discovered that my friend’s WiFi access point had been unplugged from the wall (along with the kettle, toaster and other appliances). That got me to thinking: isn’t that a sure-fire signal to burglars that the home owner is away for an extended period of time?<\/p>\n

So here’s the scenario. I’m a technically adept burglar. I sit my laptop on the passenger seat of my car (or van more likely), bust out my WiFi Pineapple<\/a>\u00a0and start driving around my target neighbourhood. While driving I’ll note the houses that I think are worthwhile hitting, and after a few loops around the area I’ll have a pretty decent map of the various wireless access points. I can then overlay those on Google Maps and isolate the wireless networks which correlate to the houses I noted were worthy of my attention. I now have my list of targets.<\/p>\n

Now the attack comes. Each week I repeat the exercise, driving past the target list and noting whether the WiFi access points are still operating. If I find one that is no longer visible, I make a note of it to do a closer\u00a0reconnaissance of the property to determine if the owners are away.<\/p>\n

This type of criminal intelligence comes with a very low cost of entry, and requires only a moderate level of computing ability. Moreover, I can easily see a market for this type of intelligence; that is, someone with the requisite skills does the technical bit, and sells the target list to local burglars on either a commission or capital basis.<\/p>\n

How do you defend against this type of attack? Leave your WiFi on whilst you’re away. Whilst that isn’t a 100% guarantee that you’ll defeat this type of attack (I won’t go into that bit), it’s a good first step.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Something slightly off topic, but an important thought none the less. I recently stayed at a friend’s\u00a0house as they are away on an extended vacation. I cleared the mailbox, put out the bins and made sure the lights were on for a good portion of the night to ward off any burglars who may have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":144,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smevidence.com.au\/website\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smevidence.com.au\/website\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smevidence.com.au\/website\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smevidence.com.au\/website\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smevidence.com.au\/website\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.smevidence.com.au\/website\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":150,"href":"https:\/\/www.smevidence.com.au\/website\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions\/150"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smevidence.com.au\/website\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smevidence.com.au\/website\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smevidence.com.au\/website\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smevidence.com.au\/website\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}