AirTight Prevents 'MultiPot' Bug Attacks

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- AirTight Networks, the leading provider of wireless intrusion prevention solutions (WIPS), announced that its SpectraGuard® Enterprise product is the first in the industry to detect and prevent the security threat presented by wireless MultiPot attacks. AirTight released the patch immediately following the DEFCON 15 conference during which AirTight security researcher, K.N. Gopinath, revealed the discovery of this potent Wi-Fi hacking tool on August 4th. MultiPot is a more potent variant of Evil Twin against which the prevalent defenses, in particular deauth-based session containment, have been totally ineffective until now.

“This variant of Evil Twin, which we call MultiPot, is one of several vulnerabilities recently discovered by AirTight researchers,” said Pravin Bhagwat, CTO for AirTight. “As hackers continue to create new and more sophisticated ways to gain access to networks through wireless vulnerabilities, it is important for those of us in the security community to discover these threats, alert vendors and the enterprise through responsible disclosure and quickly develop tools to defeat them.”

Older generation WIPS solutions with wired side (port shut-down) prevention techniques are also completely ineffective against the MultiPot threat and new techniques are required to address this and other evolving threats. These new techniques are part of AirTight’s continuing leadership in identifying emerging threats and placing priority on developing products to derail those threats.

With the release of SpectraGuard Enterprise 5.5 in the fall, AirTight is taking WIPS technology to the next level of location and prevention to keep up with increasing wireless threats such as MultiPot as well as the challenges presented by emerging technologies such as 802.11n. SpectraGuard Enterprise is the only WIPS product to currently protect against both MultiPot and Denial of Service (DOS) attacks which attempt to disrupt the Wi-Fi network.

“SGE is the only solution to provide a unique DOS mitigation process comprised of accurate detection of attack, location tracking of the DOS attacker, and suppression of the DOS attacker to the extent that it does not blackout legitimate communication,” continued Bhagwat. “While some other products facilitate location tracking of APs and clients, they are completely helpless in locating a DOS attacker, much less preventing or mitigating a wireless DoS attack. Only SpectraGuard accurately detects DoS attacks without generating many of false alarms and only SpectraGuard can mitigate or alleviate the effects of such an attack to allow WLAN communications to continue.”

AirTight Networks Inc.