August 6th, 2007
DEFCON 2007 - Wall of Sheep (shame)
It’s time to count sheep again and I don’t mean the ones in your sleep. I’m talking about the ones on the Wi-Fi Hotspot that are using insecure protocols and getting their online accounts compromised. What you’re looking at below is the DEFCON 15 Wall of Sheep.
What do I mean by compromised? Usually that means username and passwords are being transmitted in the clear for anyone to see or it means your account can be hijacked such that an attacker can get in to your account anytime they want after they copy your online Web session. In the above screen shot, a VERY large number of Gmail accounts that failed to use secure HTTPS (https://mail.google.com) were hijacked. This is despite the fact that they logged in using HTTPS because Gmail by default automatically kicks you back in to HTTP mode.
The Wall of Sheep team hunts down the sheep in their command bunker
Robert Graham and David Maynor side-jacking sheep with Hamster
Learn how to protect your online privacy here.
George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
