boakes.org

I was pondering the rapidly decreasing price of handhelds and wireless hardware today, for example 802.11 enabled PDA’s, when a potential attack technique came to me.

1. Take one relatively inexpensive wireless enabled handheld computer.
2. Post it to a non-existent person at a company which you believe to have a wireless network
3. The machine will in the mailroom for a while before being “bounced”.
4. Set it to run your favourite wireless scanning program once every few hours.
5. Have the machine “phone home” once it’s makes a connection, using that connection.
6. You now have a machine, potentially inside the corporate firewall which you can use to tunnel your content until the battery dies - use the available time compromise a more permanent machine.

Notes:

1. Using a Return-To-Sender address might get you in trouble if this turns out to be illegal in practice.
2. For added bravado, why not send it to a real person - hopefully they’ll like the gift and not notice the background scanning and kindly recharge the unit, maybe even taking it to other sites.