Hacking the Hacker

23Wireless Hacking

Today’s computing world works on wireless networking. It’s a rarity that anyone plugs in a network cable to their desktop or laptop computer, and no one does that for their cell phones and other computing devices, even though the wired world is faster and more secure. It is a wireless world—a world that hackers are constantly attacking.

The Wireless World

The wireless world is big and broad. The wireless networking that we have on our home network access points is the 802.11 Wi‐Fi standard, but the term “wireless” encompasses a huge swath of the electromagnetic spectrum, which includes X‐rays, light, radio, and other forms of wireless energy. The identification and allocation of a portion of the wireless spectrum is determined by the number of waves per second (i.e. frequency) and distance of the wavelength. 802.11 is the wireless networking standard among the 900 MHz and 2.4, 3.6, 5.0, 5.8, and 60 GHz frequencies. The computers in our lives use many different wireless technologies, including magnetism, light, satellite, terrestrial radio, Bluetooth, Near Field Communications (NFC), RFID, and microwave. Much of the wireless spectrum is controlled by laws and regulatory bodies, which is good because without them much of the spectrum would be unusable and unsafe.

Types of Wireless Hacking

Each part of the wireless spectrum and the various communication standards for it determine the types of hacking that are likely to be performed on them, although the ...