Darknet Diaries #151 has an Australian dude explaining a form of this type of attack and how he stole money out of a middle eastern bank for a wealthy client. Maybe it's not exactly the same but it struck me as similar because he uses weak WiFi security as part of the exploit chain as well as hopping between compromised residential networks to obfuscate the origin.
This is a little different. What he was doing is essentially setting up proxies all over the world.
These guys hacked into a machine connected by ethernet with an idle wifi adapter, then used that idle wifi adapter to connect to the wifi of a company nearby.
> These guys hacked into a machine connected by ethernet with an idle wifi adapter
And having an idle wifi adapter like that is common nowadays. For some reason, many desktop PCs intended to stay in a single fixed place come from factory with a built-in wifi card and built-in antennas. You'd think that would make these PCs more expensive, but apparently wifi cards are cheap nowadays?
I worked for an MSP (Managed Service Provider) when the pan hit. A bunch of our clients took their workstations home (CAD designers) and couldn't get online because they had no wifi.
I understand wanting to save a few bucks times dozens of employees, but I always thought my company was fucking stupid for letting them purchase those machines with no backup for if their network card failed. Turned out this was a much worse situation.
All that said, if you aren't using wifi to connect to the network, turn the damn thing off.
> A bunch of our clients took their workstations home (CAD designers) and couldn't get online because they had no wifi.
> I understand wanting to save a few bucks times dozens of employees, but I always thought my company was fucking stupid for letting them purchase those machines with no backup for if their network card failed. Turned out this was a much worse situation.
That's not exactly a difficult situation. Get an external wifi adapter. They're currently $10-$20 on Amazon.
You don't need to invest in exotic preparation for a problem that is so trivial to fix when it arises.
> All that said, if you aren't using wifi to connect to the network, turn the damn thing off.
Sure, but as a hacker who just hacked that machine, i can just turn it back on and you probably won't even notice. i can probably make it hard for you even TO notice.
WiFi and Bluetooth are usually provided by the same device, and it makes sense to want Bluetooth on a desktop. So you get WiFi essentially for free if you get Bluetooth.