Liverpool researchers create contagious airborne Wi-Fi virus ‘Chameleon’

Computer scientists at the University of Liverpool have designed and demonstrated that a so-called “virus” can attack Wi-Fi networks, and found that it can spread “as efficiently as the common cold spreads between humans”.

 

Chameleon travels across Wi-Fi networks via Access Points (APs) – which are devices that connect many homes and businesses to Wi-Fi networks.  Many of the passwords on these devices are set as default and largely unchanged, so the “virus” is able to gain control easily, and steal private and confidential information, and passwords.

Chameleon is “able to avoid detection and identify the points at which Wi-Fi access is least protected by encryption and passwords”, according to the University’s website. They found that densely populated areas allowed the virus to spread more quickly and areas that offer Wi-Fi such as in hotels, airports and cafes were more vulnerable to attack since they offer no encryption security.

Apparently, Chameleon doesn’t affect how a Wi-Fi connection works, instead it stealthily collects users’ data and then moves on to find other Wi-Fi access points to infect.

Chameleon is only ever found in Wi-Fi networks, therefore, it can easily avoid detection from anti-virus software.

The scientists at Liverpool are working on software to prevent such attacks from taking place.

HMA! Quality Assurance manager, Zoran Tadic says “Whilst this is not a real virus, but a self-replicating router firmware that attacks routers which are not password protected, HMA! encrypts all data traffic with every VPN connection, so that even if a router is hijacked the traffic is unwatchable.  All data is encrypted at the start and end points of the tunnel (the user’s computer and our VPN server).  The best way to ensure your router doesn’t get hijacked is to protect it by changing the login credentials (change the default ones) and use one of the standard Wi-Fi encryption protocols (WPA/WPA2 are the strongest ones). This would make every router 100% safe from Chameleon”

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