The Security Mentor

Someone from a security firm, and a student at the U.S. Naval postgraduate school in Monterey, California, found a security bug that could worry anybody with a wireless card.

They discovered that if they sent a particular sequence of wireless data they could take over the computer which received the data. The computer doesn't even have to be attached to a network -- this hole is open as lng as the networki card is turned on.

It's a bug in one manufacturer's software. Owners of other wireless cards don't need to worry (yet; I expect more problems like this one). Unfortunately, the people who discovered this aren't saying who the affected manufacturer is. They're saving that for a public announcement at an upcoming security conference. Presumably they've let the manufacturer know so as to give them time to fix it.

Someday soon, you may hear about a fix to software for some brand of wireless card (watch this space). There will be some way for you to upgrade. When that happens, upgrade. Bad guys will look at the fix and reason backwards to what the problem was. Then they'll build nasty software to take advantage of the problem. They probably won't hang out in coffee shops waiting for people to infect: they'll probably build the attack into existing viruses as yet another way for them to spread.