Airport Authorities provide free Wi-Fi facility in the premises in order to facilitate travelers to connect to their comrades for work, entertainment and maximize their experience.
Business travelers connect to the airport Wi-Fi and share important information on cloud based networks (Dropbox, G-Suite, Office 365, etc) without realizing that they are putting their confidential information on the platter for the third parties to enjoy.
Coronet Security recently conducted a survey indentifying airports that have insecure networks and inadvertently put confidentiality and integrity of the important data at stake.
Airport operators often sacrifice Wi-Fi security for consumer’s convenience, leaving the network unsecured, unencrypted or improperly configured to allow them to connect to Wi-Fi easily without any hassle. However, this act inadvertently leads to traveler’s data being compromised by the adversaries who can utilize the insecure Airport Wi-Fi to introduce a plethora of network vulnerabilities like:
- ARP Poisoning: Address Resolution Protocol poisoning (ARP poisoning) is a form of attack in which a cyber miscreant sends fake ARP messages over LAN (Local Area Network). This causes the attacker’s MAC (Media Access control) address to be linked with the IP address of a legitimate server on the network resulting in victim’s sensitive information on the device accessible to the culprits.
- Wireless Phishing: This is technique used by cyber criminals to leverage wireless users to divulge sensitive information.
- VPN Gaps: Accessing VPN (Virtual Private Networks) services via insecure Airport Wi-Fi can make your device susceptible to security breach resulting in fraud operations like extortion.
- Evil Twins: These are illegitimate Wi-Fi access points masqueraded as legitimate to eavesdrop on wireless communication.
These network vulnerabilities can be utilized to:
- Steal user sensitive information
- Deliver malware to the device
- Hinder Device Communication
Even if the Airport Wi-Fi is secured, attack Techniques such as Key Reinstallation Attack (KRACK), can utilize the vulnerability in WPA2 protocols to peculate sensitive information from the device as well eavesdrop on the network to intercept shared information over public or private Wi-Fi.
Coronet security corporate operations have therefore come with a solution to help travelers identify network threats at airports, thereby protecting the device information from being compromised and avoid unauthorized access and ransomware and malware spread.
Coronet conducted a survey wherein data from more than 250,000 consumers of Airport Wi-Fi travelling via America’s 45 busiest airports was collected. The survey was conducted over the course of five months.
The collected data consisted of:
- Risk associated with insecure Airport Wi-Fi networks and
- Device Vulnerabilities: A vulnerability score was assigned to each device based on security factors like:
- Anti- virus installation and Updation
- Password Protection for accessing the device
- OS legitimacy
- Trusted apps
- Active and Updated firewalls
- Data encryption
- Privileged user account and permissions.
Following complete analysis, Coronet’s threat protection platform used proprietary algorithms to assign Coronet Threat index to all the airports in America denoting the probability of risk associated with Wi-Fi usage in the respective airports.
The greater the vulnerability scores the higher the risk. Score above 6.5 signifies unacceptable exposure.
As per the report San Diego, John Wayne, William P. Houston Hobby are the most vulnerable and Chicago-Midway, Raleigh Durham and Nashville are the most vulnerable airports.
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