Wireless Hacker

I hacked my first wireless network today, but don't worry, I had my white hat on. One of the neighbors had left their wi-fi network wide-open to anyone and everyone, and didn't even bother to change the default password. It took me 15 seconds to gain control of their access point, but once I did, I merely changed their wireless channel. If you have a wireless access point, please set it to something other than channel 6, as that's the default channel of almost every brand of access point, which leads to a lot of access points (4 in range of the house here) that are speaking on the same channel, which is a bad idea. It's too bad I couldn't easily identify which house the network belonged to, or I'd have set their password for them, and let them know that they need to secure their network better, but I don't really have any easy way to track that down.

Nessus

I'm using the Nessus scanner to detect machines on campus that are vulnerable to last weeks ASN flaw in Windows. I tried last week, but the only plugin available then required registry access, which isn't very helpful on campus. There's a new plugin available now, however, that checks via an NTLM login. What we've discovered, is several machines that were updated via WindowsUpdate weren't really updated after all. Their registries think that the patch was installed, but the actual file wasn't replaced, so we're back to manually installing the patch on those machines.