Information security specialist Matthew Vahnhof has discovered serious vulnerabilities in Wi-Fi technology. In several videos posted on his YouTube channel, the specialist spoke about them.
The researcher found several weaknesses in the technology called Frag Attacks. Some of them, according to Vanhoff, appeared in the 1997 version and have not been fixed since.
Wanhof was able to discover that using the flaws he discovered, attackers could intercept their victim’s traffic. In theory, anyone who was within range of the network could steal the information. However, this was not easy: a successful attack required interaction with the victim and unusual network parameters on her device.
At the same time in Twitter Vahnhof assured that the problems he discovered one way or the other are totally related to all Wi-Fi devices. The researcher noted that the consequences of the attacks depend on the device itself: sometimes the effect can be serious, and sometimes it is minimal.
The specialist confirmed that he was able to publish his work after only nine months of discovering the security holes. It had to comply with the ban at the request of the Wi-Fi Alliance, which took time to remove identified shortcomings. Some of the vulnerabilities found by Vahnhof have already been fixed; Work is in progress on the rest.
Earlier, chief analyst of the Russian Society of Electronic Communications Karen Ghazaryan talked about why it was not safe to use public Wi-Fi networks and gave some advice on how to protect yourself when using public Wi-Fi.
