mobile security

An unnamed researcher, together with H.D, Moore, creator of metasploit and director of Security Research says vulnerable systems are exposed to a “stack-based buffer overflow that can lead to arbitrary kernel-mode code execution.” Essentially, you’re vulnerable when connected via WiFi as an attacker who is connected to the same WiFi network as you could remotely run some code on your machine. For this, the attacker needs to be running Linux, metasploit and have a wireless card capable of performing raw packet injections. The offending driver is called BCMWL5.SYS Laptops known to be using this driver (among other manufacturers) include Dell, Gateway, IBM, eMachines and HP.

What is interesting about this hole is that malicious packets will be seen by the driver before it is seen by a firewall, rendering it useless.

Until a driver a driver update is posted, a useful workaround for vulnerable systems is to switch to another wireless driver (e.g. Linksys) or to disable wireless completely.

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