How Portable Can Wi-Fi Get?

by The Piano Guy

If you subscribe to Fortune Magazine in the United States, and if you're on a select list of high-roller technologists, you may have gotten some hardware included with a recent issue.

Microsoft decided to promote Office 365 by putting a T-Mobile Wi-Fi router in the magazine.  Thin enough that it could go into a magazine, the router is set up to provide 15 days of service for up to five devices at once, and is supposed to work three hours on a charge (it is rechargeable).

In some ways, doing this was kind of a waste.

They only sent it out to select technology professionals (alas, I was not among the lucky anointed), and it is very likely that these people already carry Wi-Fi access around with them on their cell phones.  While it certainly gets the attention of the movers and shakers in the industry, Office 365 should have already been on their radar.

Making a router small enough to go into a magazine, irrespective of the reason or the client, carries other ramifications.  The router was manufactured by a company named Americhip.  I expect that Americhip is going to be the recipient of many social engineering attempts to get samples of the router, and that people will be Dumpster diving outside of tech companies for their routers out of used Fortune magazines.  I've already sent in my request for one to do research on it.

More importantly, as the Canadian government noted, these magazines were carried by tech managers into government secure facilities.  I have to think that this also happened in the United States, though we will never know for sure if it did.  Government secure facilities aside, most major corporations with research and development facilities have a "no transmitter" policy in their research and development areas.  I have personally worked in areas in corporate America where before a person can go into certain areas of headquarters, all transmitting devices and photo-capable devices must be relinquished and are locked up in RF-shielded lockers.  They won't be thinking to look for magazines unless alerted.

Unless we can get our hands on a unit, we will not know if the SIM card is removable.  My thought is that this has to be a design feature, since Americhip may want to use a different carrier for a different advertiser.  If the SIM card is removable, so is the 15 day limit on the service, as well as the restriction on using T-Mobile.

If we get our hands on a unit, then there is the possibility of hiding a Wi-Fi hotspot in very inconspicuous places.  It would be illegal to set up the Wi-Fi hotspot at a Starbucks and tempt people to connect to it for use with Wireshark, but I expect that it will be done.  The equipment that is currently sold that works in such a small form factor is quite expensive.  Being able to get this hardware this small at a price that it can be repurposed to function this way and is small enough to put into a magazine will increase the vulnerabilities that are out in the wild.

The takeaway from all of this is that technology, as it gets smaller and less expensive, will increase the vulnerabilities that black hat hackers can perpetrate, and increase job security for the white hat hackers that will help protect average people.

Keep everyone safe out there.