One of the convenient things about the holidays is that plenty of potential victims congregate at shopping centers. Credit: Wireshark Team, via Wikimedia Commons First, find an easy target Spying on web traffic sent over a network. It’s So Easy to Monitor the Public’s Internet Traffic The scores are pretty bad: Tons of online traffic remains entirely unencrypted today, leaving the public susceptible to attack. While the state of insecurity has improved since Firesheep’s prime, an attacker can still phish you and play games with your packets when you use a public network. Since everything on the web should be encrypted nowadays (and many people incorrectly think that all traffic is encrypted), one might expect that there isn’t much to be seen. Over the holidays, I set up an experiment harvesting public Wi-Fi traffic. I am also a big proponent of encrypting everything on the Internet, always.ĭuring my day job, I work on making the Internet safer and more performant at Magic - which is building a decentralized Internet backbone for the future. In a past life, I had a lot of fun playing with payphones.

I have conducted (only a few years ago) social engineering experiments against, e.g., my own phone providers, having friends of mine trick them into letting them access my accounts and information in dangerous ways (resulting in those companies inadvertently violating federal privacy and consumer protection regulations).

I am a security researcher and cypherpunk with a fascination for the human element and its role in everyday people’s privacy and security. A rare photo of me in my teen years with friends (I’m not sure how United Artists Pictures found this gem)

Using wireshark illegal wifi