Fear my leet hacking skills!

[chrisvenus]

Well, it appears I have just hacked my first network sort of. A private house network running behind a cable modem or ADSL I think. I now have full control of a machine on the inside of this house network.

Whose you ask? I think my next door neighbour. How? And indeed why do I only /think/? Well, it goes like this...

About 30 minutes ago my wireless network connection died. I tried a few things ultimately ending in a reboot and no joy. Stuck a physical connection in and looked at our gateway to see if it could see any error messages. Nope. Then housemate comes home who also has wireless so I try her laptop and hey presto, internet connection.

She is surprised as she had turned off encryption last night when out. Odd. I turn encryption off on mine and it works. Worrying I think. Maybe encryption just turned itself off. Then I notice that the IP address I have is odd. As is the gateway. As is the wireless network name. Oh, somebody else is clearly running a wireless network with no encryption nearby. :)

WHy do I think its our neigtbour? Mainly because he runs the local computer shop and so is almost certainly going to have shiny techness and things like that. Could be somebody else but he is my best bet.

Anyway, tfm is trying to work things out while I sit and giggle slightly. I personally think we just need to go into the attic and reboot our wireless thingy.

Just thought I'd share this slightly comedy thing. So anybody wanting wireless come round to goodson walk where its all free. :)

Comments

[susanofstohelit.livejournal.com]

umm... that's not actually hacking... :-P

Re:

[chrisvenus]

Don't you try being geeky at me, young lady. It is hacking from the point of getting unauthorised access to the network. It just required a remarkably trivial exploit of a basic bug (that wireless goes where you don't want as well as where you want and thus is usable by anybody if encryption isn't used).

You're jealous of my hacking skillz too aren't you? :)

Re:

[susanofstohelit.livejournal.com]

the only emotion I feel towards anyone who uses l33t is pity.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

XR15 0\X/NZ G00D50N \X/ALX L0L5!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Wireless connections everywhere.

[davefish.livejournal.com]

A couple of months ago Louis, one of my housemates, tried an experiment. He set up his laptop to look for gateways on to the interwebtiewhotsit, and went for a drive down to Milton and back (About 3 miles round trip.) Over that journey, he managed to pick up 43 gateways! Wireless tends to be pretty much a free for all :)

Re: Wireless connections everywhere.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

So basically a case of, hm, i need to use the internet. I just drive down the road with my laptop and use the wireless network of No 2 who have a 1MB cable connection...

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

That's very odd... 'cos my wireless system is unencrypted, but you still need to know the group name in order to connect to it. Not secure, but not something I'd expect anyone to get by accident !

More likely your access point suffered a power failure and has rebooted with default settings...

Re:

[chrisvenus]

Ummm... no, I don't think you do dom. At least I am fairly sure when I came round first time with my laptop I connected without. Wireless networks broadcast their names (I have a scan button when asking names and it tells me) and I am relatively sure that is how I connected to yours. :) I can certainly try it on sunday if you want since I am likely to have laptop and wireless card.

[chrisvenus]

We were definitely connected to another network though. Power cycling the base station bought it all back up again with encryption keys and everything. Also the gateway that the DHCP server set me to (and worked) was definitely a different one (different external and internal IP).

You're just jealous that I am l33ter than thou. :)