There once was a magical time for the sniffing hacker – a time when only certain websites were protected with SSL sessions, so most browsing took place via easily intercepted and easily mangled HTTP packets. We could sit in a coffee shop and casually listen to the environment, sipping on a latte while watching URLs and content requests fly by. If we felt like being pranksters, we could use Ettercap filters to replace any JPG in a request with one of our choosing – sometimes a picture of a cow, or sometimes it was something more sinister.
It didn't take long before the industry noticed that some unpleasant individuals were sitting in coffee shops and replacing all the JPGs with pictures of cows, and as Wi-Fi, in particular became far more ubiquitous, technologies designed to provide a high level of confidentiality for even...
