Nikon’s Wi-Fi Camera Opens Door to PC Attacks

The Nikon Coolpix P1 has 8 megapixels and is superbly engineered. It’s biggest asset: wi-fi connectivity. It’s biggest liability: wi-fi connectivity. You see, as it opens up via wi-fi to connect to other gadgets it also opens itself up to potentially harmful hackers.

The way the P1 communicates involves a fair amount of data exchange between the camera and the host PC. These packets do not include any kind of authorization mechanism that would keep out attackers (e.g. hash of picture, secret key, etc.). As it turns out, the only protection is based solely on the MAC address of the “camera,” which is easily spoofable.

In addition to sending your vacation pics flying through the air, the P1 can also open up your PC to a whole range of attacks, including DoS attacks and infected JPGs and executables, not to mention allowing others to potentially intercept your photos.

The bad news, if that wasn’t bad enough, is that there apparently isn’t any easy fix outside just not installing Nikon’s WiFi software on your PC — thus killing the camera’s only wireless functionality.

[Via informit.com]

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