A Red Team Housecall
This makes its way around the Internet. I rewrote it for technical accuracy.
Girl invited me over to “fix her WiFi.” I am a red team engineer with custom firmware on my router and no IoT devices.
I showed up 10 minutes early, hoodie on, my laptop loaded with a hardened gentoo install I self-compiled.
She opened the door holding a MacBook Air. I saw she had chrome installed with 43 tabs open. I almost left right then.
“Can I see a network diagram?” She laughed. “It’s just the router from the ISP.”
Alright … Let her have it.
I popped open her router admin panel, with a default password:
admin123. The SSID was “PrettyFlyForAWiFi”. I rannmapscan.
- No firewall
- 1 subnet, no vlans
- 12 exposed ports
- 3 outdated IoT devices
- A printer running telnet.
… raw digital nudity.
“Do you ever get lag?”
“What’s lag?”
“Is the network slow?” “yeah sometimes Netflix buffers.”
I loaded up Wireshark, attaching it to the LAN side of the network. My machine is sluggish under the load of packets, I need to stop the capture to see the stream. I check the IPs and find they are located in several East European countries.
“So your TV is on the wifi, huh?”
“Yeah, but I never use the smart features, it’s too slow”
“Do you update it?”
“Update what?”
… I’m struggling to stay composed. I reframe.
“Update the software on the TV. Your network will be much faster if you just … take the TV off the wifi. Your … TV looks to be participating in a botnet.”
“Is that bad?”
“It isn’t good.”
I offered to segment the network and install pfSense. She said she “just wanted Spotify to stop cutting out.”
I airgapped her Sonos out of pity.
After 20 minutes of work, I asked for her phone to remove TikTok and clean the app permissions. She said “but I need it for filters.” I looked into the distance. Deep sigh. I looked out the window and whispered …
“The panopticon isn’t metaphorical.” “Are you always this intense?”
“No, only when the NSA is listening.” … Which is always.
She offered coffee. I declined, caffeine raises your attack surface.
I get up to leave, she goes, “Thanks, you’re like, really good with computers.”
I walked away slow. Her router was still on UPnP. So was my heart. You can’t patch people. Believe me, I tried.
// date_night_final_final_forsure.txt.gpg#exit