May 30th, 2007
Free Wi-Fi Driver vulnerability auditing tool released!
In this last year, we’ve had a rash of critical wireless driver vulnerabilities affecting major vendors from Apple, Intel, Broadcom, to D-Link (Atheros). Driver vulnerabilities even extended in to the Video driver space with the NVIDIA flaw. Then there are the weaponized penetration tools like Metasploit 3 that can demonstrate the effectiveness of these exploits and wireless fingerprinting research from Johnny Cache that can pinpoint vulnerable driver versions. Just about the only ones in the security world that haven’t started looking at driver exploits is the security patch management industry which is shameful. When I spoke with the patch management companies at RSA 2007 in February and asked them about driver patches, they looked at me with a blank stare as if they didn’t even know what I was talking about.
Fortunately, someone is looking out for our interests and Joshua Wright of Aruba Networks has released this free Wi-Fi driver vulnerability assessment tool to help you figure out how vulnerable you are and where you need to patch your Wi-Fi clients. The tool will search out your entire network using the WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) API with your administrative credentials and scan every PC on your network for vulnerable Wireless LAN device drivers. Every IT department should be downloading these tools as soon as possible and audit their PCs. These vulnerabilities are very serious and can lead to total system compromise even if the user doesn’t have administrative credentials.
George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
