One click can direct people to your home
For those of you who think internet is anonymous. Finding personal details has anyway become too easy in this world but now people can drop in right at your house. Beware and be aware :o)
Web attack knows where you live
The attack exploits the way routers handle requests for ID information. One visit to a booby-trapped website could direct attackers to a person's home, a security expert has shown. The attack, thought up by hacker Samy Kamkar, exploits shortcomings in many routers to find out a key identification number.
It uses this number and widely available net tools to find out where a router is located.
Demonstrating the attack, Mr Kamkar located one router to within nine metres of its real world position.
'Creepy' attack
Many people go online via a router and typically only the computer directly connected to the device can interrogate it for ID information.
However, Mr Kamkar found a way to booby-trap a webpage via a browser so the request for the ID information looks like it is coming from the PC on which that page is being viewed.
He then coupled the ID information, known as a MAC address, with a geo-location feature of the Firefox web browser. This interrogates a Google database created when its cars were carrying out surveys for its Street View service.
The attack uses data gathered by Google's Street View cars
This database links Mac addresses of routers with GPS co-ordinates to help locate them. During the demonstration, Mr Kamkar showed how straightforward it was to use the attack to identify someone's location to within a few metres.
"This is geo-location gone terrible," said Mr Kamkar during his presentation. "Privacy is dead people. I'm sorry."
