Cross-Platform Hacking

The sad fact is that no matter whether you are using a Windows, Macintosh,
Linux, or Windows CE PDA, you are as vulnerable to the same
types of hacker attacks as wired networks, only you have to worry about
these attacks coming from outside your building.
It is not uncommon for hackers to try and access your WLAN, but did
you know they don’t have to be located right outside your building? In
fact, many workers are finding that with the proper antenna array you
can access an 802.11b network from as far as a few miles away from
your offices. Parabolic dishes (like the ones used for satellite television)
can be aimed from one point to another. Many mobile workers who live
near their offices have one of these 18-inch dishes on the roof pointed in
a clear line of sight to another parabolic dish on the roof of someone’s
home. It is possible someone can be that far away and still have access
to your system.
Hacking is not just affected by distance; it can be done from one platform
to another. One very important fact about 802.11b, and one which
people are unaware of, is that the Macintosh computers in both the old
Wireless LAN Security Factors 37
Mac OS 8.x�"9.x and the new Mac OS X use an “Airport” card. The Airport
card for the Macintosh is an 802.11b card! You may be thinking
that the Mac is a different platform and can’t access the resources on my
Windows network, so I’m safe. Wrong! There are a few programs for the
Macintosh that enable that computer to access any Windows network
share through the native Macintosh interface. One program that works
very well is DAVE, from Thursby Software. This program works in the
older Mac OS 8 and 9 as well as natively integrating itself into Mac OS
X. It makes access to a Windows share on your wireless network very
easy. In fact, it can even make a Mac computer appear to be a Windows
NT type of workstation on your Windows network. That means someone
could theoretically be inside your company dragging and dropping files
onto what appears to be another Windows computer, but could very easily
in fact be a Macintosh computer running DAVE. The Mac integrates
even more easily into a WLAN than a PC does!
You might not think Linux-based machines running common distributions
(Red Hat, SuSE, and others) supported 802.11b, but they do! In
fact, both Red Hat and SuSE have built-in native support for at least
five common wireless NIC cards on the market. Linux is a great operating
system because not only can you access wireless network shares on
802.11b, but there are a wealth of very easy to use and comprehensive
hacking tools on the Internet that allow the Linux machine to monitor
your wireless network, probe its traffic, and create an entire picture of
everything you have running. Accessing anything on your network from
Linux is almost as easy as using a Macintosh; but with more hacking
utilities, Linux becomes a much more dangerous adversary of your wireless
security.
The most difficult device to detect on your network is the wireless
PDA. Both Palm and Windows CE devices can now natively support
802.11b. They can access e-mail and Web shares, and there are a number
of utilities that allow them to emulate an entire Linux or DOS operating
system to gain pocket functionality to hack into your systems. For
the Windows CE environment, a program called “PocketDOS” can not
only emulate a full DOS system on your PocketPC or Windows CE
devices, but can also emulate Linux in a convenient portable package.
With the proper knowledge, these devices can be totally concealed, yet
have complete wireless access to every system on your wireless network
without anyone’s even knowing about it!
Just as wireless LANs permeate building materials and distance,
they can also migrate from one platform to another. The truth is that no
matter what you do, you can never calculate all the devices that will

have access to your WLAN. In fact, the new generation of cellular
phones have a PDA built right into them, and soon will include either
BlueTooth or 802.11b built directly into these devices. The next time you
see someone take out their cellular phone to make a call, they could very
well be connecting into your wireless network. Most locations in airports
across the country even have wireless LANs set up to allow people to
have mobile Internet access at any time while waiting for their flights.
The only problem with this convenience is that your traffic is almost certainly
not encrypted (because these types of networks were designed to
be public without any encryption methods whatsoever). This means that
it is a very simple matter for someone to eavesdrop on your network connection
and see any or all of the corporate data you are sending to your
home network.