Instead, like a parasite living off its host, an infected router could simply monitor the PCs' Internet connections and relay any nonencrypted traffic back to the worm's creators. To be effective, he added, a Wi-Fi worm wouldn't need to then jump to the PCs that link to the routers. Such an outbreak, says Steven Myers, assistant professor at Indiana University's School of Informatics and one of the researchers on the project, would hop router to router in densely populated areas such as Manhattan or downtown Chicago. In the group's New York City model, the simulated worm burrowed into 18 000 routers within two weeks. Their research, now under peer review at a leading computer journal, reveals that simulated malware epidemics in seven American cities infected thousands of wireless routers in each city within just the first 24 hours of the epidemic. 10 January 2008-Computer malware outbreaks today-viruses, worms, and Trojan horses that infect Internet-connected PCs-are global phenomena, attacking computers from Paris to Palo Alto as if there were no distance between them.But, computer-security specialists say, in the near future some malware epidemics could be more localized, jumping instead from one Wi-Fi�connected device or router to another.Ī group of four computer scientists from Indiana University in Bloomington is examining the dangers of the still-hypothetical ”Wi-Fi worm.” Given the wealth of personal data on most Wi-Fi�connected PCs-and the known holes in some Wi-Fi security protocols-today's widespread wireless Internet connections, they say, should be monitored for malware spread over the airwaves.
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