Hacking Wi-Fi networks with the Pineapple Mark IV honeypot
Darren Kitchen spent this weekend walking around the SXSW festival with an unobtrusive but relatively evil red box attached to his backpack: it impersonated Wi-Fi networks in hopes of convincing laptops, phones and other wireless devices to connect to it.
Kitchen's hot-spot honeypot worked. During just a few minutes in the lobby of the Omni Hotel in Austin, Texas, he disrupted dozens of Wi-Fi connections and rerouted them to his own "network" that replaced all internet pages with a video of the Nyan Cat kitten flying through space. Someone with malicious intent could have done far worse.
Kitchen, founder of Hak5, says the WiFi Pineapple Mark IV box highlights the security flaws of the way Wi-Fi has been implemented. There's also a privacy flaw. Currently, Wi-Fi devices broadcast the list of open Wi-Fi networks to which they previously connected — meaning an astute observer may be able to tell where the owner works and socialises.
