Sean Reiser

So, I’ve been up at Panera Bread a lot recently sitting at home on the internet can be depressing and the trek up to PB gives me a reason to walk for a bit everyday. To be honest it’s a bit of a community there, the same people show up most days, I get to talk to folks, it’s rather fun.

Over the last couple of days the performance on the network has been inconsistent. As people know that I’m a technologist they’ve come to me to figure out what was going on. I really wasn’t looking into it (it felt like network saturation, probably someone coming in and downloading the world), but the cause fell into my lap when someone came in, sat at the table in front of me, launched his machine, started his peer to peer software and everything ground to a halt. I launched kismet and wireshark and determined that someone was pulling down 2MB/s and had their MAC Address and IP address. I was 95% sure that it was my “friend” but I didn’t want to approach him unless I was certain. All of a sudden my sneaky side turned on.

Airpwn is a piece of software that allows someone to spoof wireless traffic so you can inject wireless packets and make it look like it’s coming from the access point. At hacker conventions a common prank is to use airpwn to replace graphics on webpages with different images (I’m looking at you RenderMan). (I know that's a simple explanation, if you really want to know how it works, feel free to google airpwn). Inspired by the pranks of Render and others I decide to pull down airpwn and set it up for a little prank of my own. I target his IP address and replace all the graphics on pages he’s surfing to with this:

He gets the message and looks around suspiciously. I give him a few minutes and he doesn’t stop so I up the ante a bit and inject this:

He jumps back a bit with this one as if he didn’t know he was being targeted. You’d figure this would get him to stop, but no he keeps downloading his files. I figure the problem is that I’m signing my messages so I figure I’d let him know who I am and that I’m willing to help:

Now the genius looks left and right but doesn’t turn around so he doesn’t see me, so I try to help him out:

He turns around, looks me in the eye. I give a wave (sorta like Vir waving to Mr Morden in Babylon 5). Turns back to his machine, packs and practically runs out the door (rather fun). I wonder if he’ll be back tomorrow.