comp527

A recent bug in Times Warner cable modem had caused the wireless admin site exposed to a potential hacker. About 65,000 users are affected by this. More details can be found here

The most amazing part of this is that the administrative portion was guarded off by JavaScript code. A simple toggling of JavaScript option exposed this vulnerability.

I admire David Chen for reporting this issue to the concerned authorities. His ethics would go a long way.

A question which always seems to pop off is ” How secure is wireless access?”. Ever since the first draft of 802.11 specifications, people have been able to exploit wireless networks easily.

A classic paper which uncovered the lame security aspects was “Intercepting Mobile Communications: The Insecurity of 802.11″ (link) . This paper showed some very simple tricks to attack wireless medium. It was an eye opener to the 802.11 committee who formed the very basis of the protocol.

In my opinion, we require a new framework to test these vulnerabilities. Even if the protocol is safe, there is some implementation problem. If the implementation is right, there is an issue with hardware and this chain keeps going on…