How easy is it to capture data on public free Wi-Fi? - Gary explains By Android Authority

Hi there, my name's Gary Simmons from Android Authority. Now, if you've watched my videos about VPN or about encryption, you'll have noticed that I've said several times. We must be careful when using public open, Wi-Fi hotspots now. The reason for that is because the information, the data that's sent from your smartphone or from your laptop to the access point, is actually broadcast in every direction for anybody to collect and to analyze, and so, that obviously poses a bunch of different problems. But the question is: how easy is it to actually collect data collect network packets on a public, open, Wi-Fi system? Well, let me explain so when you connect to a public open, Wi-Fi, the connection between your device and the Wi-Fi router is in the clear it's not encrypted, and that's because people want you to connect to it to use it while you're in their shopping mall or in their coffee shop, for example, and therefore the data that's sent is completely open and, as I said a moment ago, it's sent in every direction. It's not just sent kind of like directly in the line of sight of the router, and if you have the right equipment, anybody can pick up all those data packets that are floating around in the air now normally a Wi-Fi adapter, whether it's one for in built into your laptop built into your phone or one that you use through USB, is in what they call managed mode, and that basically means it just wants to talk to a Wi-Fi hotspot.

It wants to send and receive data, and it's not really interested anything else. That's going on. However, the Wi-Fi standard allows these chipsets to be put into several other modes, and one of them is called monitor mode now in monitor mode the Wi-Fi chips. It can actually pick up and receive the packets that are going anywhere in the air, whether they're going to the guy on the table. Next to you, whether they're going to a guy who, down the shopping a more little bit, you can receive all of them because Wi-Fi signals are pervasive.

They go absolutely everywhere when they are sent out now, not all Wi-Fi chipsets can do this. It's cheaper just to make a Wi-Fi chip set that just sticks in managed mode, because the firmware and the hardware logic is much simpler and that's actually the kind of 99% news case that people just want to connect to a hotspot and to send and receive traffic home. If you get hands on the right piece of equipment, then actually you can put it into miter mode now, for example, I have here a dongle that I bought from Amazon. You can get it for under $20 it's by uplink, and it actually has the right drivers that you can set this thing in to monitor mode now. To do this, you're going to need a thing called Kali Linux as a special Linux distribution, but you don't have to install it on a laptop and then kind of over install windows or anything like that.

You can run it as a virtual machine and if you run it as a virtual machine, you can then plug the USB adapter, and you can actually associate it with the Linux distribution, and it's like you're running on a separate meter with virtual machine. Now I've done some testing using my laptop and using my virtual machine for color dips and everything I'm going to tell you now is actually what I've done myself. That and step by step. I've actually proved that this works now. Rather than give you all the actual commands here during the video which will be hard for you to follow, go over to the Android source comm website and look at the article that go to this video, because there I've listed all the commands that you need, and they're easy there for you to cut and paste and to read and to study, to see what I'm doing.

But basically you first, you boot up Kali Linux, and then you plug in your USB adapter. You make sure it can be seen, and then you switch the adapter into monitor mode, and you use some tools from the air crack suite to do that and then once you've found the Wi-Fi network that you want to listen to. You then, basically just say to the air crack suite use this Wi-Fi adapter to just capture all the packets that are going around in the air, and they will be captured onto your hard disk and then once they're in your heart, is you can use tools like driftnet & Wireshark, to examine all of that data and see? What's there now very quickly, you'll be able to grab out some URLs, you can see what websites people have been visiting, and you'll also be able to grab any pictures that have been flowing around in the air to see what people have been viewing now to test. This I put my own Wi-Fi hotspot here in my house. It was completely opened, so maybe, for a few days my neighbors were able to get a bit of free internet access, but I'm sure they've all got into axes anyway, and basically I use one laptop connected to that.

Wi-Fi hotspot and I use my hand with phone, kicked a hotspot, and then I use my laptop running Kali Linux, along with this Wi-Fi adapter and I, just captured all the stuff that was going out, and you can actually find that you can pretty get hold of a lot of information, particularly for example, I went to a particular football website soccer for those in North America and all the player pictures that I was downloading and looking at I've now grabbed from the Wi-Fi dongle, and it's actually I've got stored on my hard drive, and I wasn't even connected to the same Wi-Fi router. That's the beauty of monitor mode. You can actually grab things out of the air as they're they're whizzing past now. Obviously, if this was the case that absolutely everything it would be a disaster, every email, you read every time you went somewhere to an instant messaging, everything would be open. Now.

Thankfully there is this thing called HTTPS you've probably seen it when you type in a URL and when you go to a website, that's using HTTPS you'll see that little padlock sign now the s and the padlock sign are showing. This is secure. It's in encrypted connection. So even if the packets are flying around in the air freely between your device and the Wi-Fi hotspot, once those packets have been grabbed from the air, if you have a look inside them, it's all gobbled good, because it's encrypted, you can't see. What's in this, all the pictures are encrypted or the URLs and crypto all your emails are encrypted and so on and that's great now.

The number of websites that use HTTPS now is increased a lot and that's thanks to project likely, let's encrypt project and also the free availability of orbit relatively free availability of SSL certificates. Now what that means is that when you connect to a website in Google, for example, for their search and for everything that you do on Google, including Gmail, all over HTTP, so whatever you're reading on Google, whatever your search on Google, can't be seen when you're on a public free, Wi-Fi hotspot. However, many sites only use HTTPS when you're doing the login, so at least your passwords protected and when you're doing the kind of the check-out with what you've purchased if it's a commercial site. So that's come as well, but in between time, when you're browsing all the different products, they are freely available because they're in the clear. However, that's changing in Google have a report card available, which kind of gives you a list of all the sites that use HTTPS from end to end.

So things are really improving on the web browser front and, of course, you've got that little icon. That tells you whether you're connected securely. However, things aren't quite as simple when it comes to Android apps. Whenever you use an Android app, and it's getting data, it might begin advert data, it might be sending some personal profile data about you. You might be using a network service, whether it be social media, whether it be instant messaging or where it multiplayer gaming.

Whatever you're doing you, don't know whether that connection Oh encrypted connection, and that's because there is a little padlock sign, there is no little green sign to tell you that everything's going okay, you just have to trust that app are not all apps by any measure. Use encryption during the networking part of their design now, unfortunately, is not easy way of telling which apps do in which apps don't you actually have to sit down with a Wi-Fi adapter like I've, got and start to monitor this traffic and see what's available, and that's obviously time because you know some people have written reports about this, and they are out there to fine. However, it's really a problem. We can't find out quickly whether an app uses encryption or not. Now, if we take an app like WhatsApp, they have declared public clean.

It even says so in the app that everything you do over what tap is encrypted. So even if I'm using it on a public Wi-Fi hotspot, then it will be encrypted, doesn't matter if someone grabs all those packets out of the air you can't see what's inside them, however, other app like get Google's all messenger has clearly stated it doesn't use encryption only when you're in incognito mode now I haven't tested it to see how bad that situation really is. But it is interesting that even popular app by big companies aren't necessarily using encryption. So do be careful when you're, using an app on your phone, be sure that you're 100%, you know that it's using encryption, otherwise it could be stolen when you're connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot now grabbing things out of the air is one thing that can happen on a Wi-Fi hotspot, but it's not the only thing that can happen on a Wi-Fi hotspot. Another problem can be.

Is people can set up rogue access points, fake access points deliberately just to lure you in so that you connect to them, and then they have control over your traffic? So, for example, maybe you go to a particular coffee shop, and it doesn't have Wi-Fi and then one day you see that it does. You know great. The shop got Wi-Fi I'm, so happy I want them to have Wi-Fi for a long time, and actually it's not there's a guy two tables down with his laptop and with a Wi-Fi adapter like the one that I've gone, he set up his own access point. All the tools for that are available on Linux distributions, like Kali Linux that I mentioned earlier on, and then what happened is everything that you send to the internet actually goes to his laptop first, where you can store it, and he can also manipulate it and worst of all, he can Directive. So you think you're going to amazon.

com and in fact what comes up is a website that looks very similar if it's a clone of amazon. com. But really it's a fake website that he put up deliberately just to capture your login passwords. You then go and login, it says login fail, and then it will probably redirect you to the real website where you log in and go. Oh, I must have typed in the password wrong, but actually you've.

Now, given him your username and password. So that's a danger of using untrusted, Wi-Fi access point and that's the problem. When you go to a shopping mall, there might be like 10, 20, 30 40, different Wi-Fi networks listed okay and someone will open. Some of them are not, and they all look legitimate because they're all names of the shops that are around you, you think I'll well, I'll click to the Starbucks Network I click to the two whatever network, and actually there could be a guy sitting on the bench behind you who set up that Wi-Fi network. So be careful and there's a third thing that can happen when you click to public Wi-Fi, and that is a thing called art spoofing.

Now every single network card in the world has a thing called a MAC address. Even this thing has a MAC address and that's the media access control address, and it's unique they're established in the factory when it goes out of the door and everyone in the world is different. It's a PC, it's a laptop. It is a adapter like this, whether it's your smartphone they've all got these adapt unique addresses on them and what happens is when you have an IP address. That's to the Internet address.

What happens is that another PC or another devices hey who owns this address, and it uses the up the address resolution protocol to say who owns it, and then it says I do, and the MAC address is sent back in out in a normal security environment. That's absolutely perfect, that's how it works, but actually, when you're an open public Wi-Fi, you can spoof that. So someone comes along and says: hey who owes his address, and you say I do, but you don't you don't own it at all, but you lie. You get your PC to lie about the fact that it owns the address, and that means now traffic that was going to go to one place. Probably the router now comes to you and once it comes to you again, you can then do lots of different things.

Like phishing attack man middle attacks. You can actually set it up so that all the data is restored on you, and then you redirect it to some relatives they're going somewhere simple, like a news website, you just redirect if they're going somewhere that you're interesting their past or as PayPal eBay Amazon whatever, then you can send them over to a fake site and try to do a phishing attack on them to try to capture their username and password. So there are three things that can happen. You can capture the package out of the air using monitor mode on the Wi-Fi adapter. You can set up a fake Wi-Fi hotspot to lure people in and in to capture their information and ARP spoofing allows people on open, Wi-Fi networks to redirect traffic, and you really don't or not, even none the wiser about what's going on and then with web browsers.

We must be careful we're using HTTPS that you've got that sign up there on the padlock sign the little green box saying everything is ok, but on Android apps, it's much harder to know whether the app is using SSL or not so be careful unless it's something like WhatsApp or other apps have declared publicly they're using encryption, be careful when using those apps over a minute. What my name is Gary Sims from Android or authority I. Hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please do give it a thumbs up if you want the tutorial, but how to do these things? The exact command you type in to Kali Linux, to replicate what I've been doing go over to the Android chrome website and find the written articles got all the things listed for you. There don't forget to subscribe to and royalties YouTube channel, don't forget to download our Android or 'ti app, because that will give you access to all of our latest news directly on your mobile phone and don't forget daily.

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Source : Android Authority