Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
BlackSheep Sniffs Out Firesheep, Reveals Snooping
November 10, 2010
Monday's post on the new Firesheep snooping software stirred up a lot of dust – apparently its availability was not known to many. Firesheep is a Firefox extension designed to sniff out weak security and hijack web site credentials on open Wi-Fi networks. So much for computer security at Starbucks.
Thanks to my eagle-eyed husband and partner, John Simek, for finding BlackSheep (via LifeHacker), software by Zscaler that is an anti-Firesheep tool, designed to alert you whenever Firesheep is active on your local network.
Zscaler, a company specializing in security measures for cloud-based computing services, created Blacksheep to counteract Firesheep session hijacking. Once installed, Blacksheep broadcasts fake credentials to essentially fish for Firesheep installations on the network.
When Firesheep is detected, BlackSheep displays the alert in the screen capture above. The configuration of Blacksheep is simple; by default it goes fishing every 5 minutes but you can adjust it down to 1 minute. Blacksheep is a free tool and works wherever Firefox does.
LifeHacker comes through again!
http://twitter.com/sharonnelsonesq
Listen to the Podcast
