Israeli Researcher Cracked Over 3,500 Wi-Fi Networks in Tel Aviv City
Oct 28, 2021
Over 70% of Wi-Fi networks from a sample size of 5,000 were hacked with "relative ease" in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, highlighting how unsecure Wi-Fi passwords can become a gateway for serious threats to individuals, small businesses, and enterprises alike. CyberArk security researcher Ido Hoorvitch, who used a Wi-Fi sniffing equipment costing about $50 to collect 5,000 network hashes for the study, said "the process of sniffing Wi-Fis and the subsequent cracking procedures was a very accessible undertaking in terms of equipment, costs and execution." The new Wi-Fi attack builds on previous findings by Jens "atom" Steube in 2018 that involves capturing what's called the PMKIDs associated with a client (aka SSID) in order to attempt a brute-force attack using password recovery tools like hashcat. PMKID is a unique key identifier used by the access point (AP) to keep track of the pre-shared key — i.e., pairwise master key aka PMK — being u