hacker.org

**these are thoughts i came up with i did not post them to just be used as a vent for your home problems a.k.a don't start a flame war**

so the other night i was thinking about some wifi junk and worms so then i was wondering is it possible to create a worm that would spread from network to network by cracking the keys (wep cracking/brute force wpa/ other network exploit) and infect computers on the network but not actually use it as a weapon in till you get enough computers (let it spread then launch it as a malicious program all at once for massive devastation) --and if it was a really advanced worm it could infect phones and war drivers that pass by (unlikely)

I think it is theoretically possible but overall somewhat impractical. If you only have one wifi connection then without a custom driver I don't think you'd be able to scan/attack and be connected to the original network (which would be a give-away+flaw, a lot of people can't get on the internet have little reason to turn their computer on which means low processor time to crack other networks) and communicating between the infected computers for coordination without an internet connection in that case would be awkward. In part you could get around the single connection issue by searching/cracking when the internet appears to be out of use but still if the internet isn't being used in some way then the computer is probably off in a lot of cases.

There is also the problem that infectable networks will form lots of 'islands' where you might have at best something like 6 networks within range of each other and then that's all you've got so to get a good task force you'd have to bypass the rift between these islands, maybe with a facility to propagate over portable media or the internet but I don't think it would make a successful primary method of propagation, it could make an interesting secondary method but I think it's cost to the survivability of the app would be too much to make it worth unless you only used that method on computers with 1+ unused wifi connections.

Wireless networks do appear to be quite an amusing playground though so maybe you could come up with and even implement some scheme to play around with your WiFi neighbours (and maybe get a few more processors)?

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Also I don't see why you couldn't propagate over mobile phones, but I'm not familiar with the hardware/software scenarios so can only guess cases.