Drive-by spam hits wireless LANs

Wed Sep 11 12:08:03 UTC 2002

>I agree, but people said that the spammers wouldn't be able to
>deal with BGP route advertisement but there was cases of spammers
>injecting routes sending out spam then removing those routes. Wlan is
>easy.

Spammers come from every walk of life including the various technical 
professions. Otherwise where would all the spamming software and 
web-scraping software come from!? Just because someone is a technical 
expert in BGP routing doesn't mean that they will use their skills the way 
that many NANOG attendees would like them to. Even in the early days of 
spam, the green-card spammers hired a technical person to set up servers 
and write spamming scripts. And let's now forget the uber-hackers who 
create the scripts used so effectively by script-kiddies.

And let's not forget, these spammer geeks learn the knowledge from the 
same places as everyone else, including the NANOG mailing list. I reckon 
there is a 99.95% probability that there is at least one NANOG subscriber 
who is a currently an active spammer geek. So if WLANs were relatively 
safe yesterday, they won't be safe from now on.

Of course, if spammers are reduced to driving around major cities in vans 
generating 802.11b radio traffic, it might be a lot easier to catch 
them...

--Michael Dillon