Disable wireless on bootup

While at ShmooCon, I saw a fair share of rogue ap's pretending to be shmoocon ap's. We worked to pull down these access points, but you can never be sure. To help keep yourself from getting pwned, disable wireless upon startup by commenting out your wireless interface. This will prevent anybody from hacking your laptop (via wireless) before you even see the login screen (if you boot to desktop) and also allow you time to scan the wireless access points and decide which to connect to.

#begin /etc/network/interfaces

auto lo iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet static address 172.16.2.123 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 172.16.2.1 network 172.16.2.0 broadcast 172.16.2.255 nameservers="172.16.4.5 172.16.4.6"

iface eth1 inet dhcp wireless-essid shmoocon

auto eth0 #auto eth1

#end /etc/network/interfaces

Posted by Marcin on Sunday, March 25, 2007 in Linux and Security.