Hackers know where you live by geolocating your MAC address
One visit to a booby-trapped website could direct attackers to a person's home, a security expert has shown. The attack, thought up by hacker Samy Kamkar, exploits shortcomings in many routers to find out a key identification number.
It uses this number and widely available net tools to find out where a router is located. Demonstrating the attack, Mr Kamkar located one router to within nine metres of its real world position.
Many people go online via a router and typically only the computer directly connected to the device can interrogate it for ID information. However, Mr Kamkar found a way to booby-trap a webpage via a browser so the request for the ID information looks like it is coming from the PC on which that page is being viewed. He then coupled the ID information, known as a MAC address, with a geo-location feature of the Firefox web browser
