DEF CON crowd suspected in fake-hotspot attack on Delta flight

40 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by dangle1
(arstechnica.com)

18 Comments

port-tcp

9 hours ago

I hope people realise this is the potential outcome for their skiddy behaviour.

https://www.afp.gov.au/news-centre/media-release/man-charged...

alephnerd

9 hours ago

They never do. This happens every year at BH/Defcon, and they always make an example out of the perp yet someone always does some dumb shenanigans.

jetbalsa

8 hours ago

This year we had a really bad RF jammer on 140mhz fucking with the Ham Radio Village/Contest. The story I heard was someone yelled into hardware hacking area that the FCC was coming and the jamming stopped

alephnerd

8 hours ago

Hehe. That's hilarious.

Sadly, the barrier to entry for a lot of script kiddie shit is minimal and apparently common sense ain't common.

scrapedface

7 hours ago

The fox hunt players could have found this dumbass in an instant.

jagermo

2 hours ago

oh, someone bought a pineapple and wanted to try it?

user

8 hours ago

[deleted]

charcircuit

5 hours ago

>a fake hotspot (“Delta WiFi Fast”), with a phishing landing page “designed to harvest passengers’ personal credentials.”

It wasn't a fake hotspot. It was a real hotspot with a SSID that potentially infringed Delta's trademark. CFAA doesn't prevent harvesting people's credentials since it's the user's own machine that people are connecting to.

tweetle_beetle

an hour ago

Can SSIDs really infringe trademarks? Clearly the context is a bit different in a truly isolated environment like a cabin at cruising altitude where alternatives are not reasonably expected, but am I not allowed to call a network I run from an apartment in a densely populated area where others could acces it `BigCorp is crap`?

mcny

8 hours ago

Is this really where our law enforcement should be spending its resources? I would say rescuing kittens from trees is a higher priority than this nonsense.

Also worth noting wherever we get a chance — the Computer Fruad And Abuse Act itself is nonsensical and must be abolished. There is no salvaging it. It must be repealed with no replacement.

I don't think the FBI has enough agents to play tech support to anyone who doesn't understand how wifi works.

skullone

5 hours ago

People allegedly broadcasting fake SSIDs on a plane to do credential harvesting on a plane shouldn't be prosecuted? Ok...

mindslight

7 hours ago

Have you ever seen a cat skeleton in a tree?

Still, I agree.

kotaKat

2 hours ago

Why yes, yes I'd like to see someone's shit get pushed in for interfering with the wireless networks on the aircraft. It should have parked at the end of a taxiway and waited for LE to meet it on the pavement instead of even parking at the gate.

They didn't just jam the pax WiFi, their stupid stunt also causes havoc with the internal crew SSIDs available below 10k. Pilots and flight attendants were definitely not pleased having their electronic flight bags and some of the app-based comms drop off the face of the earth in flight.