Security News > 2021 > October > Israeli Researcher Cracked Over 3,500 Wi-Fi Networks in Tel Aviv City
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 in order to attempt a brute-force attack using password recovery tools like hashcat.
The collected hashes were then subjected to a "Mask attack" to determine if cell phone numbers were used as Wi-Fi passwords, a practice common in Israel, uncovering 2,200 passwords in the process.
In a subsequent dictionary attack using "RockYou.txt" as a password source, the researcher was able to crack an additional 900 hashes, with the number of breached passwords decreasing as the password length increased.
"A strong password should include at least one lower case character, one upper case character, one symbol, one digit. It should be at least 10 characters long."