Archive for the ‘Wi-Fi security’ tag
Hacking neighbor from hell
Cracking WEB using Backtrack (image from http://ryanunderdown.com/)
I have four roommates. I love having roommates, especially since we are all interested in urban homesteading.
One of the first things new roommates ask for when they move into my house is ‘what’s the wi-fi password?’
I have to write it down and hand it to them, because I use a complicated password dozens of characters long.
Am I being silly?
I don’t think so.
Have a look at this Wired article entitled Hacking neighbor from hell.
Here’s the first few paragraphs that sumarize this crazy story rather well:
“A Minnesota hacker prosecutors described as a “depraved criminal” was handed an 18-year prison term Tuesday for unleashing a vendetta of cyberterror that turned his neighbors’ lives into a living nightmare.
Barry Ardolf, 46, repeatedly hacked into his next-door neighbors’ Wi-Fi network in 2009, and used it to try and frame them for child pornography, sexual harassment, various kinds of professional misconduct and to send threatening e-mail to politicians, including Vice President Joe Biden.
His motive was to get back at his new neighbors after they told the police he’d kissed their 4-year-old son on the lips.”
Fortunately, one of the victims is a lawyer, and his firm had access to a network specialist that installed a packet sniffer to figure out what was happening. The sniffer logs led the FBI to raid the home of the neighbor, where lots of incriminating evidence was found, including the child pornography the criminal posted in the name of the victim.
This episode reminds me of the 1990 Melanie Griffith and Michael Keaton movie Pacific Heights, where a tenant terrorizes his landlord in an effort to get the landlord to sell the duplex at a low price to the tenant. The tenant stops at nothing, I recall, and even deposited a big box full of large cockroaches into the landlord’s unit via gaps around common water pipes that connected the units. Pacific Heights is one of those movies you remember a lot about even years after seeing it.
