It was clearly a situation of killing as many birds with as few stones as possible. On deadline to do something about some horrible orphan of an article that’d been hanging over my head, having a podcast that needed to get done and wanting to do it all from Matt’s couch where we had planned to watch the UFC (inveterate fight fans that we are) Saturday night I had my hands full. But Matt lives in San Francisco. A highly DENSE section of San Francisco, and while I could have jacked in via his Ethernet he, also on deadline (another magazine, another level of procrastination), was online.

No prob. The awesome power of the web and wi-fi action means that this would get done and sure enough there were no fewer than 10 connections flowing through Matt’s place. Hmmm….Let’s give TRANNYCHASER (maybe something to do with cars?) a try: hmm, password protected. What about AON? Also password protected. As were ALL 10. I mean what were the chances? What ARE the chances that 100 percent of the folks in a reasonable wi-fi radius would have taken seriously our constant entreaties to actually password protect your wi-fi connections?

I guess pretty good.

And is it any wonder. With all the backchatter about hacking Apple’s wireless device drivers, HD Moore’s Metasploit blowing holes through your security patches and the Month of Kernel Bugs thing we just wrote about it seems that security is the new rock and roll. Even though anecdotally not a single person I know has suffered a malicious incursion of any kind, we’re all obsessed with safety these days. And that’s just fine. This will not help me to get what I need done and since I have no intention of leaving Matt’s couch I need a solution.

Enter coWPAtty.

It’ll muscle a password out of your neighbor’s networks…but it is slow, slow, slow and the fight starts in an hour. Not only that but if someone’s using an Apple Airport access point with WPA2 encryption it uses AES encryption, which is an Advanced Encryption Standard, and this will make it even harder. Especially if they choose the highest available encryption option (232 ->104 -> 40). At the appointed hour I haven’t cracked any passwords, nor have I written my article. But I, um, DID see the fight.

Ah….success.