Web attack knows where you live

BBC News item - Creepy

Creepy indeed. I'd like to know more but for obvious reasons the article doesn't quite tell all

I thought that an IP address by itself, which is interrogatable by a website at the server end, can locate a user within a reasonably small area.

But the database of MAC addresses would seem to serve no useful, realistic purpose other than for this exploit. Why on earth was that data captured and more to the point, what's it doing being made publicly available?

Wait for the bogus warnings from kiddies pretending to be big:

"I know where you live!"

Yup, then you have to sail an ocean, or drive hundreds of miles, and then you have to go through lots of other little obstacles, such as doors, guard dogs, alarm systems and the person at the other end could built like a tank.

No, I don't think it's going to be a hit with the scrawny little armchair warriors.

Not great if combatting organised crime though. Maybe we should rotate our MAC addys or places of residence.

Yeah that is what it is using the mac address table that has been harvested by Streetview.

When they have been round photoing the streets they have also scanned wireless networks and recorded all of the information, they've come under fire for it but have said its nothing illegal.

What I'm not sure is how they get your routers mac address from its ip address that would usually only be available from your ISP's RADIUS server/routers so there must be an exploit via the router.

Anyway, blame Google idiots

Isn't this just an update from his earlier cross site scripting exploit, meaning for it to work you would need to be logged into your router admin at the same time as visiting the booby-trapped website?

or using the other method, would need to know (or find) the ip of the router and hopefully login with default password?

and surely it's the WLAN (wireless) MAC database that's being used, not the ethernet one.

In reply to a post by user101:

and surely it's the WLAN (wireless) MAC database that's being used, not the ethernet one.

Depends whether your browsing via wireless at the time I guess, if so it will all tie up nicely.

Google info:- http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com/2010/04/data-...