Newbury Networks Inc. conducted a demonstration on site at Defcon 13, the Computer Underground Hacking Conference, held July 29-31, in Las Vegas. Newbury's WiFi Watchdog was used to monitor and map wireless activity, enabling show attendees to see the precise location of all wireless devices and all connections between wireless devices at the conference. WiFi Watchdog also collected a rich set of data and located volumes of malicious wireless activity, including 5637 fake MAC Addresses,764 spoofed Access Point addresses, 63 rogue APs, 235 client connections to rogue APs and 57 denial-of-service attacks.

About 4000 people attended the conference. Experts in the security field taught attendees how to defend against particular attacks, outlining the mechanics of particular attacks and the attendant security vulnerability, so people attending could come away with how to secure their own organization IT.

A team from Newbury Networks worked with the Digital Wolves, an independent group of security professionals who run the venerated "Wall of Sheep" project that finds and publicly identifies users who expose their identity via unsecured connections. Newbury was tasked with supplementing the project by locating WiFi devices, identifying unsecured activity and detecting wireless attacks. They created a floor plan of the conference space and mapped the hall's "RF fingerprint" to enable pinpointing identification of wireless devices' location. A large wall display was projected, providing attendees a real-time "air-traffic control" view of wireless activity using Newbury Network's WiFi Watchdog.

"As WIFI becomes much more ubiquitous, as city after city begins to deploy wireless on a broad basis, coupled with location technology, two avenues emerge as invaluable: The primary purpose for which we use location technology is for IT security inside of enterprises and government and military organizations. We also see that people are carrying around far more phones, laptops and the like, than ever before that are WIFI-enabled. This makes it possible to track them using the WIFI signal and location tracking technology to assist in physical security, as well," said Chuck Conley, vice president of marketing at Newbury. Newbury Network products are used by many enterprises and governments to defend against the various kinds of attacks identified above.

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