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Comment by davidgerard | Hacker News Reader

My loved one went for a junior sysadmin job. They'd decided to remove all the wiring and use wifi for everything because of just the sorta hype mentioned here. Loved one pulled out a Palm Tungsten C and proceeded to crack all their WEP passwords there in the interview. Got the job too ... and the task of putting quite a bit of wiring back.

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The Tungsten doesn't support RFMON, thus it can't do packet injection, not sure how this was achieved. The most Palm OS could do was run NetStumbler, which does discovery by active beacon probing.

Maybe with a Zaurus, Libretto, or other small pocket-sized Linux machine of that era, sure.

I just asked and it was indeed a Tungsten C (the Tungsten C was a pretty l33t beast for a handheld in that era, I had one too and loved it a lot), but I got the story wrong - the wifi wasn't secured at all. Let me remind you again that they'd replaced their wired network with this unsecured wifi network. Their business was online marketing for companies even more clueless about technology than they were. (Replacing the unsecured wifi with wired was indeed the first job.)

That is soo cool!

I tell my wife [a software dev like me]: "I love it when you talk nerdy"

Lucky he/she didn't get arrested.

For what? Cracking passwords offline isn't illegal as long as you don't use the passwords to gain unauthorized access to a system and you don't share the password with anyone other than the rightful owners.

There's nothing wrong with cracking a WiFi network's WEP password in front of the owner of the network in order to demonstrate WEP's weak security. You would have to actually connect to the network to commit unauthorized access.

See other side comments - I got the story wrong, the wifi wasn't secured at all.

WEP passwords? What year is it again?

Palm Tungsten C dates the anecdote more than using WEP.

2005ish, when WEP was frequently all that wifi points did.

I got the story wrong (just checked) - the wifi wasn't secured at all. :-O

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