Yesterday I was at a conference and pulled out my laptop to see if the building had any free wireless available. There was one, with an SSID of "Free public wifi" I tried to connect, then noticed that it was a peer-to peer wireless network. I thought that was odd...and it didn't work anyway. I closed my laptop and forgot about it. Then tonight, my girlfriend and I are both on the couch using our laptops with my wireless router and low and behold, the SSID "Free Public wifi" shows up again on both of our machines, with a very strong signal. This made me a bit concerned. It was the same SSID I had seen earlier, and was (on both machines) a peer-to-peer connection type. My machine automatically connected (for some reason my router dropped its connection at this time) to the "free public wifi". I disconnected it and after getting my router back up and running, did some research. Turns out there are a few other people who have noticed this same phenomenon. Also today, this story came out. Odd coincidence, or are we about to see a wildfire of wifi viruses?
Is this a new virus that's infecting machines via wireless connections? If so, this might be ugly. Let me know if you've seen anything like this, or if you know what this is.
Friday, August 04, 2006
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I was just travelling (for several days, but that's a different story) and picked that SSID up in Laguardia airport in New York. I thought it was maybe the airports' wifi, but I noticed it was p2p right away and disabled my network card. Too late apparently, as now anywhere I go, I show that AP. Not sure what this is, but I am more than a little frightened about what this might mean. I did NOTHING besides try to connect. Wifi users BEWARE, at least until whatever this is is vetted out.
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