Final Wrap-Up

She spoke again to the site manager after connecting to and poking around the wireless infrastructure. She explained that the robots and the handheld scanners connected back to a backend inventory system via a wireless connection, and that she was able to associate with the access point after she cracked the WEP key. He explained that the inventory system that Makoto had compromised was installed about five years ago, probably before more recent encryption methods were used, and he had no idea that it communicated over standard 802.11; to him and everyone else with a computer in the office, it never looked like there was any wireless infrastructure. What’s worse is that, although Makoto did this while she was in the office, there’s no reason she couldn’t have done it sitting down the street with a high-powered antenna pointing at the building. And no one would have known.

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