Sniff Wi-Fi

Your humble author is starting a new Sniff Wi-Fi blog series today: Bad Security Stories Yours truly may not be the second coming of Bruce Schneier -- though from what I've read of Schneier's I like his vibe -- but all these years of sniffing (and working in Wi-Fi in general) have led to me picking up a fundamental understanding of communications and data security. So let's blog about it! A  college football cheating scandal -- or at least, the potential for one -- was recently uncovered and resolved in a matter of three days . To steal a quote from a memorable-but-not-to-be-described-in-polite-company scene in the film Tommy Boy... hmm, that's a mystery. A quick primer: Throughout last year's college football season, there were several accusations of 'sign-stealing'. Sign-stealing involves comparing the hand signals, posters and other 'signs' used by football coaches to signal to their players what formation and/or orchestrated 'play' to ru

Eleven months ago, I wrote about Fluke Networks' Ethernet testing tool, the LinkSprinter .  Now there's a new model, the LinkSprinter 300 , and Fluke was nice enough to send me one to test.   LinkSprinter 300 is basically the same as the LinkSprinter 200, except it costs an extra $100 and it has two extra features: one cool and one that I haven't tested. I really, really hate it when people say "read this" in the middle of a discussion.  It is sauce of the weakest variety.  Just frickin' summarize it.  People tend to give me the ol' "read this" either when discussing a topic that they've written about or in an attempt to cite evidence.  In both cases, a summary will do.  If you are discussing Wi-Fi sniffing with me on Twitter and you wrote a white paper saying that Wireshark is the bee's knees, then tell me why on Twitter.  If you believe that it wasn't a fact that the Earth is round until Greek philosophers proved it a few th

It's time to switch things up a bit.  WiFi sniffing is a fascinating topic and all, but good ol' Yours Truly wants to try something new.   This will be the first in the "Not Sniffing, but..." series on the Sniff WiFi blog.  I come across interesting topics outside of sniffing all the time, so I want to add short blog posts on some of these topics. Several months ago WLAN bon vivant Keith Parsons  posted a blurb on his WLANPros.com blog about the Fluke Networks LinkSprinter .  I contacted someone from Fluke Networks to ask about the LinkSprinter, and they were gracious enough to send me one to test. LinkSprinter is a wired testing tool.  It's more for people who install APs than for people who, like me, primarily do frame captures.  Still, we both do troubleshooting.  The LinkSprinter is definitely for troubleshooting. The tool is pretty simple.  You plug in an Ethernet cable, and you press the lone button to start the test.  You'll immediately get a