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Comment by BrandoElFollito | Hacker News Reader

MITM became some sort of miraculous hacker solution.

To MITM you need to be on the way of the traffic, or manipulate the DNS. None is obvious.

Do you recall the days when it was common practice for ISPs to MITM all traffic?

The most obvious and profitable use case were those ISPs who returned 404 pages riddled with advertisements for domains that were unregistered (e.g. if you mistyped a URL)

Certain ISPs even injected JavaScript into every page.

“I” in the OP’s comment probably means “government” or “ISP” rather than a friendly roommate on the same wifi network.

> Do you recall the days when it was common practice for ISPs to MITM all traffic?

This never existed in France. That would have been completely illegal.

There was a time when this existed in France and was not illegal. I believe that's why the OP was saying "Do you recall the days when..."

When was it, and with which ISP?

Not op, but see this

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/foci11/tech/final_files/...

France isn’t listed, but Germany, Netherlands, United States (obviously) are. This was a thing that used to commonly happen before TLS became standard.

Bold of you to assume lawmakers would be ahead of hackers on the technology front.

Just create an open wifi called „free wifi” in any crowded place…

Too obvious - just give it the same ESSID and password as your local coffee shop's network, and let the "Connect Automatically" setting on Windows do the rest.

Many if not most WiFi clients send a list of SSIDs they would want to connect in cleartext in their directed probe request frames in the active scanning mode. I expect there are attackers automatically advertising these networks to lure in devices.

This is far from being obvious to find out and hardly a scalable MITM.

These are always the same tricks that work in a lab, but then when it comes to do an actual MITM on a web site - there are no solutions.

If my web site is www.example.com, you would need to get very close to the site (network topologically speaking) and insert yourself in the traffic. This is in practice undoable, except if you hack the local network where the web server lives (specifically some equipment) or the server itself.

Or hack the DNS server.

None of these are remotely easy with basic security in place.

My remark was tongue-in-cheek. I'm aware that this would only go as far as appearing as a bridge router, which Windows often designates with a number after the name (e.g. WittyNetworkName 2). It's not very subtle, and you would likely only intercept a fraction of the traffic from a client, as they would default to directly contacting the host where possible.

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