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If criminals were to target unsecured wireless routers, they could create an attack that could piggyback across thousands of Wi-Fi networks in urban areas like Chicago or New York, according to researchers at Indiana University.
The researchers estimate that a Wi-Fi attack could take over 20,000 wireless routers in New York within a two-week period, with most of the infections occurring within the first day.
"The issue is that most of these routers are installed out of the box very insecurely," said Steven Myers, an assistant professor at Indiana University who published the paper in November, along with researchers from the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Torino, Italy.
The researchers theorize the attack would work by guessing administrative passwords and then instructing the routers to install new worm-like firmware that would in turn cause the infected router to attack other devices in its range.
Because there are so many closely connected Wi-Fi networks in most urban areas, the attack could hop from router to router for many miles in some cities.
The team used what is known as the Susceptible Infected Removed (SIR) model to track the growth of such an attack. The methodology is typically used to estimate the scale of events like influenza outbreaks, but it has also been used to predict computer virus infections, Myers said.
Although the researchers did not develop the attack code that would be used to carry out this type of infection, they believe it would be possible to write code that guessed default passwords by first entering the default administrative passwords that shipped with the routers, and then trying a list of 1 million commonly used passwords, one after the other. They said 36% of passwords can be guessed using this technique.
Even some routers that use encryption could be cracked, if they use the popular WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) algorithm, which security experts have been able to crack for years. Routers that are encrypted using the more secure WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) standard are considered impossible to infect, Myers said.
Myers' model is based on data compiled from the Wireless Geographic Logging Engine (WiGLE), a volunteer-run effort to map Wi-Fi networks around the world. WiGLE has more than 10 million networks in its database.
Using this data, researchers were able to map out large networks made out of Wi-Fi routers that were each no more than 45 meters (49 yards) from the network -- in other words, close enough for an infection to spread. The largest such network, in New York, included 36,807 systems; in Boston, it was 15,899; and in Chicago, 50,084.
Because New York is such a dense city with a relatively low percentage (25.8%, according to the researchers) of encrypted routers, it was particularly susceptible to this type of attack. San Francisco, where 40.1% of routers are encrypted and there is a lower density of routers, was less susceptible.
Myers said that because the attack would be technically complex, he doubted that criminals would attempt it any time soon. There are simply too many other, easier ways to take over computers, he said.
Still, he said hardware makers should take note: "The bigger point for developers and people making wireless information technology is to realize that there are serious security issues."
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