On Mon, 09 Feb 2004 11:12:58 MST, "Wayne E. Bouchard" said:
This is dramatically demonstrated by the number of NANOG attendees that do not utilize encrypted paths to communicate back to their offices and who do not maintain at least passable password standards for their own accounts. It always astonishes me to see passwords such as "asdfg", "microsoft", and "password" come up on that list.
Been there, done that. We hosted a SANS-EDU event a while back, and had about 300 people in a lecture hall, most of whom had wireless access. I ran a small tcpdump on the wireless, grabbing only outbound SYN packets for port 110, 995, and the ports IMAP lives on. About lunchtime, I announced that I'd seen some 50 or so people using encrypted POP on 995, and 65 or so using it in plaintext. Somebody asked what data I was gathering, and I said "I'm a white hat, I only looked at SYN packets enough to make this announcement." Suddenly, we have 65 relieved looking people. Then I added "But I have no idea at all what people sitting out in the atrium are grabbing off the wire" - and we had 65 worried looking people. ;) I didn't see very many SYN packets on port 110 in the afternoon session. :)