Your wifi router for gaming network is too easy to hack — how to protect yourself

Researcher finds it's far too simple to get your wifi router for gaming network password

Imagine walking around your hometown and discovering that you could break into more than two-thirds of the wifi router for gaming networks you come across.

That's what happened to Israeli security researcher Ido Hoorvitch, who "sniffed" Wi-Fi networks in the city of Tel Aviv without logging into them, but nevertheless found that he could "crack" the access passwords for most of them.

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"I gathered 5,000 Wi-Fi network hashes as my study group by strolling the streets in Tel Aviv with Wi-Fi sniffing equipment," wrote Hoorvitch in a blog post yesterday (Oct. 26).

No fancy equipment needed
That data-gathering equipment was nothing more than a laptop running the free Ubuntu operating system and the free WireShark network packet analyzer, plus a $50 strong network card with external antennae strapped to Hoorvitch' backpack to detect as many Wi-Fi networks as possible.

Hoorvitch used another free program called Hashcat to crack the passwords.

"At the end of the research," he added, "I was able to break more than 70% of the sniffed wifi router for gaming networks passwords with relative ease."

Because of his day job at security-solution provider CyberArk (disclosure: Tom's Guide is a client), Hoorvitch was able to use the company lab's new password-cracking rig containing eight Nvidia Quadro RTX 8000 graphics cards that likely cost about $40,000 in total.

But he stressed that all the password cracking he did could also be done on a regular PC, in perhaps less than 10 minutes per password if you were targeting a single network.

"You do not need a cracking rig" to do this, Hoorvitch wrote.