

The Tel Aviv Metropolitan area has more than 3.9 million people - you can imagine what the numbers would have been had we not cut our research off at 5,000 WiFi networks. At the end of the research, I was able to break more than 70% of the sniffed WiFi networks passwords with relative ease. To test this hypothesis, I gathered 5,000 WiFi network hashes as my study group by strolling the streets in Tel Aviv with WiFi sniffing equipment.

And a security program is only as strong as its weakest link. Home networks rarely have the same controls as enterprise networks. With the continued shift to remote work due to the pandemic, securing home networks has become imperative and poses a risk to the enterprise if not done so. The combination of my past experience, a relatively new WiFi attack that I will explain momentarily, a new monster cracking rig (8 x QUADRO RTX 8000 48GB GPUs) in CyberArk Labs and the fact that WiFi is everywhere because connectivity is more important than ever drove me to research, whether I was right with my hypothesis or maybe just lucky. I hypothesized that most people living in Israel (and globally) have unsafe WiFi passwords that can be easily cracked or even guessed by curious neighbors or malicious actors. I think we all can agree that not having internet easily falls into the emergency category! Often, their cell phone number was also their WiFi password! I am the new neighbor” talk with the neighbors while trying to get their cell phone number in case of emergencies - and asking if I could use their WiFi until the cable company connected me.

A solution I have to this scenario is having the “Hello. Every time I faced the same scenario: the internet company took several days to connect the apartment, leaving me disconnected and frustrated while trying to watch laggy Netflix on the TV with my cellphone hotspot. In the past seven years that I’ve lived in Tel Aviv, I’ve changed apartments four times. How I Cracked 70% of Tel Aviv’s Wifi Networks (from a Sample of 5,000 Gathered WiFi).
