Two security stories
E-mails sent by naive people can be tracked to the server using information in the header, and laptops used on insecure WiFi access points can still be traced using the MAC address of the network card or wireless card.
Further correspondence illicited an anonymous apology from Johnny, who declined to reveal his identity. However, a hacker mate of Graham’s traced his email address to the Seattle medical centre, at which point Graham urged him to do the decent thing and turn himself in because, as Graham quite reasonably put it: ‘If you’re a nursing student in Seattle and you’re a clown, you’re pretty identifiable.’
From a report in The Register by Lester Haines about a clown stealing a bicycle
“the suspects wrongly believed that the use of an insecure wireless network in commission of the crime would mask their tracks. This failed when police identified the MAC address of the machine used to pull off the theft from a router and linked it to a GE Money laptop”
From a report in The Register by John Leyden about a Finnish computer security executive who decided to commit the perfect crime – and (as always) left a loophole.
- e-mail headers contain information about the route of the e-mail and the e-mail server at the organisation from which the e-mail was sent
- The Media Access Control – MAC - address identifies the network device being used to establish the network connection – the Wireless card in this case. The network card also has an MAC address hard wired into the chip. You can find the MAC addresses of your network and wireless cards easily. However the MAC address can be ‘spoofed’ – see the Wikipedia article above.