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Firesheep usage leads to Idiocy

jonty.co.uk

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Re: Firesheep usage leads to Idiocy

#71

Post by evilduck »

NathanKP wrote: post #70
evilduck wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just choose to neglect to connotations a word carries with it and expect everyone else to do the same, especially while those connotations are still culturally relevant. Terrorism carries certain meanings in today's political climate, and by using it loosely, you're implicitly linking session hijacking as a means to spread awareness of a longstanding vulnerability to a religious, political and usually viole…

I understand what you are saying. Perhaps comparing session hijacking to terrorism is a little too harsh when it is put like that. It is still the closest word I can think of which describes what one does if they run Idiocy: threaten other people's online confidence and make them more frightened, and hence more cautious in the future. Only time will tell if Firesheep and Idiocracy are the 9/11 of the online world, le…

Culture is funny like that. Sometimes the most accurate word isn't the best, but I do see your point too.

Re: Firesheep usage leads to Idiocy

#72

Post by Groxx »

tertius wrote: post #52
lotharbot wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If half of their friends also have their fly open, shouting it might be a better option.

You can see their friends' flies open? That's one ninja technique that I didn't want to know about. Point is, you don't know, so don't assume.

To continue the metaphor...

They walked into a glass building (unencrypted wifi location), unzipped their flies, sat down, and are totally unaware they did so. Someone would have noticed eventually - would they rather be potentially gawked at behind the one-way mirror that's always been there but they never noticed (WireShark), or told, allowing them to cookie-block the ones who do so?

As to the volume of the telling, what if near enough to everyone were doing this? You would probably become the crazy person at the intersection, telling everyone the end of privacy is near, repent and use SSL. But at least this way you can demonstrate that yes, their flies are down, in a way they can see, rather than having to take your word on it.

Re: Firesheep usage leads to Idiocy

#73

Post by codexon »

wmf wrote: post #68
codexon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to do FirePiggyInTheMiddle, you need to control the router. You can't just sit in the subnet and start sending commands to random clients to hijack their connection, especially when it is symmetrically encrypted.

ARP poisoning doesn't require control of the router; it makes MITMs pretty trivial. http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Understanding-Man-in-...

Ok you guys can stop with the "but what about this" now.

We all realize there are 1000 different attacks with various levels of difficulty and all of which have appropriate countermeasures and are nowhere near the success rate nor ubiquity of simply receiving packets.

Re: Firesheep usage leads to Idiocy

#74

Post by randallsquared »

NathanKP wrote: post #51
Natsu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we not use "terrorist style" to describe things like this? I don't think anybody is going to get killed over this.

I think it is sort of interesting that terrorism is such a loaded term that people object to its use. Terrorism doesn't have to involve killing people. It just means scaring people into doing what you want.

You really want to argue that security system salespeople are terrorists? Really?

Re: Firesheep usage leads to Idiocy

#75

Post by ChRoss »

jontywareing wrote: post #67
dandelany wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm missing the logic here. If few people make a mistake, they should be informed privately, but if many people make a mistake, they should be shamed publicly? No. And to be honest, I'm getting slightly tired of the community's tendency to stretch metaphors way beyond their applicability. Mine was mostly meant to add a touch of humor. Pants, flies, and underwear aside, auto-hijacking the Twitter accounts of everyone…

I do not think this can really be considered "shaming" as it's nothing to be embarrassed about. Regarding private/public notification; Posting to your own account is an easily understandable visible demonstration of what's possible and why you should care - a DM from another account, or an @ just won't have the same effect on the user. (I have said this elsewhere in the thread, so apologies for repetition) I have bee…

I understand the intention is to warn people. But IMO, there are plenty ways of warning or educating them, e.g. blogs, tweets etc. There's no need to 'prove' it just to make awareness.

I did tell my friends and family that a tool (Firesheep) has been released and what is the impact in layman language, and inform them to be careful when browsing through open wifi networks.

Re: Firesheep usage leads to Idiocy

#76

Post by there »

codexon wrote: post #50

I don't like it that Firesheep is driving everyone to use HTTPS. You cannot have multiple SSL certs on a single IP and you have to pay a significant amount to get a cert that won't pop up an annoying page which turns away most non-technical users. There needs to be an alternative which just does key exchange and symmetric encryption without the identification.

so now firesheep will lead to massive ipv6 deployment...

Re: Firesheep usage leads to Idiocy

#77

Post by itsnotvalid »

It's like if Microsoft starts disturbing virus and worms to alert you of new bulletin updates, which is what some security experts condemn to do (sorry I couldn't find the article about Conficker with experts saying this as an approach to fight conficker)

Re: Firesheep usage leads to Idiocy

#79

Post by aiurtourist »

BrianLy wrote: post #35
deathbob wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

master>python idiocy.py Traceback (most recent call last): File "idiocy.py", line 2, in import getopt, sys, pcap, dpkt, re, httplib, urllib ImportError: No module named pcap Is there a python equivalent to RubyGems ?

Distribute. See http://python-distribute.org/pip_distribute.png

Grab the tarball from http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/pylibpcap/pylibpcap... and then "pip install pylibpcap-0.6.2.tar.gz"

You'll need the Apple Developer tools / XCode first.

Re: Firesheep usage leads to Idiocy

#80

Post by Natsu »

NathanKP wrote: post #51
Natsu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we not use "terrorist style" to describe things like this? I don't think anybody is going to get killed over this.

I think it is sort of interesting that terrorism is such a loaded term that people object to its use. Terrorism doesn't have to involve killing people. It just means scaring people into doing what you want.

While I understand what you're saying, the problem with terms like that is that they shut down rational thought for many people.

It's by no means the only such term, though: 'Republican' and 'Democrat' have the same kind of effect for a very large percentage of the problem with thoughts equivalent to, "Oh, he's an X. That tells me all I need to know about him and I don't have to know anything else."

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