The best hacks are always the simplist.
Just not always the easiest to defend against in the real world...not a defence just an observation.
A new variant of the notorious Emotet Windows malware is able to spread wirelessly by brute-forcing Wi-Fi network passwords and scanning for shared drives to infect. The wormification of the trojan attack was detected by researchers at Binary Defense, who this month reported that the technique may have been going on undetected …
As you climb it would get easier, because the higher up the corporate org-chart you go, the less time they'd have for such 'pointless fripperies' like robust passwords.
By the time you reach C-level they'll be running unencrypted wireless because 'their time is too important to waste typing in passwords'. From what I've heard of stock traders they wouldn't want encrypted wireless getting between them and their next bonus payment.
So rent an office on the tower block next door, and use a directional antenna to hack their wifi directly. Odds are they'll have very vulnerable wifi "because nobody can ever get an attacking device close enough to be harmful".
Even if this isn't possible, a wifi pineapple mounted on a drone would do the same thing, only more expensively. Once you've broken their security (if you even have to break anything), you use the drone as a relay station to attack that network.
Simples...
>a wifi pineapple mounted on a drone would do the same thing, only more expensively.
Well given the quality of super glue and other attachment mechanisms - just have the drone stick the pineapple on the outside of the building - out of the eyesight of people working in the targeted offices...
Not at all. None of them do anything like that. You're only going to see that kind of feature in shiny expensive enterprise setups that include an IDS.
With home routers, you're lucky if they're not accepting telnet connections on the both the WAN and WLAN with hardcoded unchangeable password 'root'/'root'.
>With home routers, you're lucky if they're not accepting telnet connections on the both the WAN and WLAN with hardcoded unchangeable password 'root'/'root'.
Remember, for ease of out-of-the-box configuration many enterprise routers ship with default 'admin'/'admin' style of credentials and the telnet ports on the LAN/WiFi enabled. Just another reason to change the default passwords and access settings...
However, the worm spreads by trying to connect to WiFi networks by brute forcing their password/security key. Likewise for shared drives discovered, so the credentials of the router itself, don't seem to be part of the problem.
If it's running on a PC, it won't be detecting wireless anything unless the PC has a wireless networking card. I don't think that is so common. Possible, yes, there are PCs who do connect via wireless, but I would think most PCs have an Ethernet cable because when people bought PCs wireless was not a thing.
Now if you're talking laptops or tablets, then definitely yes, there will be wireless available to explore.
PCs not so much.
Suspect rather more WIFI enabled PCs than you might think. Will be a common "fix" in a house where the router is nowhere near the PCs location - USB + WIFI more likely than a card. We have an old PC and the Sky box doing exactly that.
Is the case that all new home routers (from main ISPs at least) are pre-configured with pretty random SSID names and passwords these days? Suggest this sort of Virus is going to have much more fun in a Shopping Mall/Coffee Shop world where it can skip the brute force bit?
I think the PC bit is just a generic phrase as a lot of places I have been over the last few years, both corporate and home, are going the laptop route rather than a desktop because laptops are cheap enough that they can and it saves a lot on desk real estate. For corporates they can implement hot-desking with a docking station plus monitor/keyboard/mouse etc or offer less formal areas using wifi connectivity while at home you can sit anywhere with your laptop and not have trailing cables.
All in all I think the wireless connection is a lot more common these days that a decade ago.
Seriously when will people learn to use decent Passwords?! Been beating this stick for as long as I can remember and yet still in 2020 it's a problem.
It seemed for a while that companies were starting to enforce password security but those efforts appear to be a distant forgotten memory.
Like these 'SmartHome' devices which fixed default passwords and the like, just a joke, forget GDPR we need to get this **** put into Law, force companies to force users to set secure passwords, it's the only way and the sonner re realise it the better!