[51986] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Drive-by spam hits wireless LANs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stephen Stuart)
Wed Sep 11 13:23:53 2002
To: John Angelmo <john@veidit.net>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 11 Sep 2002 19:08:53 +0200."
<3D7F78A5.2030409@veidit.net>
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2002 10:21:25 -0700
From: Stephen Stuart <stuart@tech.org>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
> In some way you are right, but still I think it's even worse to use WEP
> cause then the admins might think it's safe, it takes about 15 minutes
> to crack a wepkey, so instead of drive-by spamming you could call it
> drive-by, have a bagle, start spamming.
WEP != security, true.
> The most hardware/software indipendent solution I have seen so far is
> the use of VPN, simply place the WLAN outside your own LAN.
This would prevent drive-by spamming if combined with a filtering
policy that makes the wireless LAN useful only for (authenticated) VPN
access and the minimal amount of glue (DHCP, DNS to a specific
resolver) required to make the VPN work. If the wireless LAN has
access to any host you don't control directly, the risk of there being
a conduit to access the wireless LAN in ways that you don't intend
goes up.
Stephen
