Free airport WiFi for iPhones….and pretend iPhones too
Boingo just announced free WiFi in 13 major airports but don’t get too excited unless you own an iPhone. That’s the only device that gets the red carpet treatment for some reason. Or is it? What if you wanted to crash the free WiFi party using a laptop? UNEASYsilence figures that Boingo is simply checking for the user agent of the iPhone, which is an identifier indicating the device’s browser. Why not just impersonate Safari on the iPhone then? That’s exactly the approach outlined using a Firefox add-on called User Agent Switcher. With this extension and the right setting, you too can impersonate an iPhone for free connectivity as far as Boingo is concerned. Nice trick!
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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They could also be checking the first 3 bytes of the WiFi MAC address. This would be even slicker since when you attach to the access point they are given the MAC in order to select the IP and setup the routing. With the right MAC range you could bypass the please give us your account information intercept.