Can you infect a wifi connection or cell phone data connection with malware on computer?

[paulyron]

Suppose you have malware on your computer and it could be virus, keylogger, or anything like that.  Let say it's a windows laptop.  Now if you use your wifi connection, is there a risk that your wifi connection would get malware as well?  Such that anyone that goes on that wifi connection could get their information compromised?  By that I mean other people who use their own laptop or device on the same wifi network.  The answer to this has to be absolutely not right?  The reason being if someone was using say a coffee shop wifi and then check their email and click on a link that had malware in it, well that malware only affects their laptop right?  Thus it isn't going to affect the coffee shop wifi connection since lot of people are there using it?

 

 

Now let say the situation is different.  Let say it's someone using their own wifi at home.  They are using a windows laptop and possibly could have a virus or malware on it because they clicked on links before.  Now any other people that uses the same wifi connection as this person isn't going to get infected right when doing whatever safe things on their device due?  I mean this is same situation as above right pretty much?

 

 

Now let say this person instead of using a windows laptop uses a chromebook and watch adult movies and even downloads videos that may or may not have malware but they do it on their chromebook which isn't their main computer that they do financial transactions on on their wifi connection.  Any difference here?  Or that even lessens the chance of anything since it isn't a windows machine?

 

 

Now let's say that same person decides to use their cell phone's data and tether it on the same chromebook.  Is there any risk to malware infecting that cell phone data or not?  

 

 

So this would also mean that same person who uses their regular windows laptop for financial transactions on their same home wifi connection or their cell phone data connection, there is no risk at all right as long as they aren't doing any dangerous things on their laptop?  

 

 

[Eigenvektor]

23 minutes ago, paulyron said:

So this would also mean that same person who uses their regular windows laptop for financial transactions on their same home wifi connection or their cell phone data connection, there is no risk at all right as long as they aren't doing any dangerous things on their laptop?

It's not impossible, though very unlikely (unless you're some state official and explicitly targeted by state level actors).

 

First you'd need malware that is able to infect three different platforms. A Chromebook, a router and a Windows machine. It would also need to be able to remotely exploit a vulnerability on "any" router (since generic malware wouldn't know what type of router you have).

 

So it would have to be contained in something that you download, it would need to be able to infect a Chromebook by e.g. exploiting some vulnerability in the video player. It would then have to be able to find and remotely exploit e.g. an open port on the router (assuming it even has a vulnerability that is remotely exploitable). It would then have to repeat the same steps for the Windows machine. That is some seriously sophisticated malware.

[paulyron]

6 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

It's not impossible, though very unlikely (unless you're some state official and explicitly targeted by state level actors).

 

First you'd need malware that is able to infect three different platforms. A Chromebook, a router and a Windows machine. It would also need to be able to remotely exploit a vulnerability on "any" router (since generic malware wouldn't know what type of router you have).

 

So it would have to be contained in something that you download, it would need to be able to infect a Chromebook by e.g. exploiting some vulnerability in the video player. It would then have to be able to find and remotely exploit e.g. an open port on the router (assuming it even has a vulnerability that is remotely exploitable). It would then have to repeat the same steps for the Windows machine. That is some seriously sophisticated malware.

Well I mean imagine you just watch adult videos and download it on a chromebook.  You could use your own wifi connection but that isn't going to affect your wifi connection right?  I done this before and haven't had any issue.  But many times when watching or downloading, I would also use a free vpn like thundervpn or turbovpn but that doesn't do much right?  Would a paid vpn be better?

 

 

Now let say I want to use that same chromebook that possibly might have malware or keylogger due to me watching adult videos and downloading adult videos on the chromebook.  Assuming I tether my cell phone data to use the internet on the chromebook and let say I don't use any vpn... not even the google play free vpn of thundervpn or turbo vpn... is there any risk of malware or virus affecting my cell phone data connection from now on?  Thus whenever I use my cell phone data on the phone or use it to tether data for internet on this chromebook or say my main windows laptop that I do financial transactions on, there is no concern though right?  

[Eigenvektor]

1 minute ago, paulyron said:

Well I mean imagine you just watch adult videos and download it on a chromebook.  You could use your own wifi connection but that isn't going to affect your wifi connection right?  I done this before and haven't had any issue.  But many times when watching or downloading, I would also use a free vpn like thundervpn or turbovpn but that doesn't do much right?  Would a paid vpn be better?

Anything you download can theoretically infect you. A VPN provides exactly zero protection against this. Though the risk of getting infected by streaming a movie (which then exploits some vulnerability in the player) is fairly unlikely.

 

The more common risk is adult sites telling you that you can't play their movies without downloading their own video player or some specific codec plugin (either of which contains malware). An executable like a video player is much more likely to carry malware.

 

7 minutes ago, paulyron said:

Now let say I want to use that same chromebook that possibly might have malware or keylogger due to me watching adult videos and downloading adult videos on the chromebook.  Assuming I tether my cell phone data to use the internet on the chromebook and let say I don't use any vpn... not even the google play free vpn of thundervpn or turbo vpn... is there any risk of malware or virus affecting my cell phone data connection from now on?  Thus whenever I use my cell phone data on the phone or use it to tether data for internet on this chromebook or say my main windows laptop that I do financial transactions on, there is no concern though right?  

As above, not impossible but extremely unlikely. You'd need very sophisticated malware that can target Chromebooks, cellphones and Windows, and is able to remotely exploit a vulnerability on the phone and the Windows machine.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

On 12/18/2023 at 5:51 AM, paulyron said:

Suppose you have malware on your computer and it could be virus, keylogger, or anything like that.  Let say it's a windows laptop.  Now if you use your wifi connection, is there a risk that your wifi connection would get malware as well?  Such that anyone that goes on that wifi connection could get their information compromised?  By that I mean other people who use their own laptop or device on the same wifi network.  The answer to this has to be absolutely not right?

 

This is exactly how ransomware spreads from one infected computer onto entire companies. It all comes down to how protected are those other computers from inbound traffic coming from that particular network. 

[wanderingfool2]

On 12/17/2023 at 9:34 PM, Eigenvektor said:

The more common risk is adult sites telling you that you can't play their movies without downloading their own video player or some specific codec plugin (either of which contains malware). An executable like a video player is much more likely to carry malware.

Also there is an abnormal amount that do try to use browser exploits, or the ads in it have capabilities to run scripts which try doing it.  (And then the ads that actually navigate you away from the page saying your system was infected, so you click on their link to download their "tool" *malware* to fix it).  Actually admittedly, MSN isn't immune to this either...I had it happen once on a link to their "news", where an ad tried this.

 

Anyways I digress.

 

@paulyron So the thing is nothing is really impossible, but we need to work in the realm of what is most likely.  Like going to sketchy sites will increase the chance of getting malware on your computer.

 

Now the majority of malware these days will be ransomware, where it just tries encrypting and forcing you to pay.  It might try sending out emails to your contacts, and do some other low hanging fruit types of things to keep it spreading.  You also get the general keyloggers/remote software stuff, but those ones again spread usually by people installing bad programs etc.

 

The thing to remember is that most of these ones are looking for a certain amount of return on their work.  To lets say have a video file that would infect people, they would have to find an exploit in something like VLC, and as soon as it's patched they lost their target.  Now a targeted attack like that can happen, but again they are often short lived as they are patched/anti-viruses pick up on them.  So for the developers of that, they would only attack that vector if they think they could make lots of money from it (it's costly to come up with zero-day exploits vs just tricking someone to click on an exe)

 

Now to address your exact concern, could an infected computer infect a phone?  The answer is maybe.  If you allow access to the file system, it might store a payload on the phone hoping you will click it or someone will.  Overall though, it's not very likely.  As at that stage they would have to find an exploit in Android/iOS where they can send a payload to the phone that gets executed.  The question would be, what would they have to gain?  At that stage you have to infect someones computer and then subsequently infect their phone.

 

Now this changes if you are lets say plugging your phone into random chargers/etc.  As at that stage they could be targeting people who are lets say charging their phones

[Milesqqw2]

Ok, it is possible that it could spread through a WiFi router or using the phone’s cellular connection, but unlikely. I will say that I think it would be worse if it was an android device rather then an iOS device, this is because android is way easier to adapt for use on many devices meaning it would probably have more holes to cover meaning a higher risk of someone finding something like a zero-day. But this would only be a problem if either the network is already infected or the file is transferred and run on the target device. 
 

So, to infect, let’s say an android device, on the same network as a Chromebook, let’s see the steps the malware would have to take to infect the phone.

 

Step 1. The malware would have to be run and installed on the computer.

 

Step 2. The malware has to be able to not be quarantined by any antivirus on the device.

 

Step 4. The malware has to be able to exploit a security risk in the router which would be hard because not all routers are the same and have the same exploits.

 

Step 5. The malware has to go from the router to the phone via another security flaw, this would be hard to do for the same reason as for the router

 

Step 6. The malware has to go undetected by any antivirus on the phone.

 

Step 7. The malware either has to be run by the user or via a zero-day.

 

Step 8. The malware plays its little game hoping it isn’t seen by any antivirus.

 

And remember, malware and humans are not the same thing. This means it won’t be able to adapt to anything as easily as humans. Computers think linearly (if a then b), but humans take many things into account (if a and b or c and parts of d and a bit of e then f g or h should be done). This is why a robot most likely won’t become sentient.

 

I am sorry for the wall of text but I just wrote one idea and they just kept coming. Another thing a computer could have trouble with.

[Kisai]

On 12/17/2023 at 8:51 PM, paulyron said:

Suppose you have malware on your computer and it could be virus, keylogger, or anything like that.  Let say it's a windows laptop.  Now if you use your wifi connection, is there a risk that your wifi connection would get malware as well?  Such that anyone that goes on that wifi connection could get their information compromised?  By that I mean other people who use their own laptop or device on the same wifi network.  The answer to this has to be absolutely not right?  The reason being if someone was using say a coffee shop wifi and then check their email and click on a link that had malware in it, well that malware only affects their laptop right?  Thus it isn't going to affect the coffee shop wifi connection since lot of people are there using it?

 

 

Now let say the situation is different.  Let say it's someone using their own wifi at home.  They are using a windows laptop and possibly could have a virus or malware on it because they clicked on links before.  Now any other people that uses the same wifi connection as this person isn't going to get infected right when doing whatever safe things on their device due?  I mean this is same situation as above right pretty much?

 

You would need to MITM (Man in the Middle) attack the WiFi connection, and that would only be possible if it's running unencrypted, or someone breaks the key used to encrypt it. Or putting a rogue WiFi router out there with the same SSID but running unencrypted so that devices that automatically connect (such as mobile phones) don't alert the user that it's unencrypted.

 

That said, finding a target would require scanning the wireless traffic to begin with, so any attack would be localized to someone within about 100meters.

 

Back before encryption was wirespread, you could "reverse" a wifi router to instead of accepting connections on wireless, you could connect to the ethernet port and it would send you everyone's traffic on all channels it could "hear". That's how you could in theory poison that traffic by either redirecting the DNS or over-powering a connection to a specific ip address.

 

On 12/17/2023 at 8:51 PM, paulyron said:

 

Now let say this person instead of using a windows laptop uses a chromebook and watch adult movies and even downloads videos that may or may not have malware but they do it on their chromebook which isn't their main computer that they do financial transactions on on their wifi connection.  Any difference here?  Or that even lessens the chance of anything since it isn't a windows machine?

I don't see why that would be different. If you wanted to push malware to a target, you'd push malware that matches the browser agent.

 

On 12/17/2023 at 8:51 PM, paulyron said:

 

Now let's say that same person decides to use their cell phone's data and tether it on the same chromebook.  Is there any risk to malware infecting that cell phone data or not?  

Not really. When you plug in a cell phone, or use it as a wireless access point, it's acting as a "modem"/"ethernet adapter" on the device it's plugged into. The cell phone can see all the data that passes through it, as it's acting as a NAT(Network Address Translator) but isn't going to do anything with it unless you have setup firewall rules on the cell phone to block or redirect access to IP addresses.

 

On 12/17/2023 at 8:51 PM, paulyron said:

 

So this would also mean that same person who uses their regular windows laptop for financial transactions on their same home wifi connection or their cell phone data connection, there is no risk at all right as long as they aren't doing any dangerous things on their laptop?  

 

 

 

These all feel like leading questions.

1. If you are accessing porn sites that might have garbage or malware on it. Yes that's a risk from visiting piracy sites.

2. If you download videos from said sites, there's a strong chance you will be sent fake files multiple times before being sent the actual one

3. If you accidently run one of these, they're usually crypto-miners, or ransomware. Most of the time you just see a fake error message generated by the website, while it downloads one of these, trying to trick you.

 

If you have not run anything downloaded, or tried to "double click" a video that was really an executable, you should still not be approving things that want through the firewall, or things that demand admin access. You're watching a video, that has no reason to access the internet or need admin access. A ransomware will, for better or worse, only be able to seize the computer if you aren't paying attention.

 

The most obvious trick and be revealed by never having "hide extensions of known files" enabled.  On Windows people get tricked because they will see something like

innocentfile.pdf

anotherfile

 

When you turn the file extensions on, it will be revealed as

innocentfile.pdf.exe
anotherfile.pdf

This is why people get fooled, they don't skeptically ask why one file has ".pdf" in it, while another PDF does not.

The same happens with AVI/MP4/MOV/MKV etc. Fortunately, if you have thumbnails turned on, usually a video will show a single frame from the video, thus proving it's actually a VIDEO, where as if it's a EXE file, it will show an icon of the thing it actually is, even if they replace the icon with a fake thumbnail, it will not match the thing it says it is. Malware vendors are not that creative. They don't have unique highdpi icons from every porn video to fool people. They are relying on people not being skeptical.

 

There is always a risk of a connection being redirected or manipulated if you connect to something you don't trust. There are literal stories/creepypasta's about people who did nothing more than leave airdrop or bluetooth filesharing on and getting unwanted data sent to them. Sometimes an attack is less about trying to get something from who is attacked, but rather distracting/humiliating someone to throw them off their guard so you can socially engineer them into doing something they would not do, or have the experience to know isn't true.

 

Like a tech-savvy person would see "John Paul is sending you a (FILENAME)" and immediately hit cancel if they don't know who the hell John Paul is. But flip that around, what if you are listening to your wireless headphones, and everyone around you starts giggling or staring. It's very easy to make a mistake in accepting permissions on a phone, and if you accidently broadcast to everyone what you are watching/listening to, that's a far more humiliating experience.

 

The default permission for everything should be "no". Hence, it's only when people don't practice good security hygiene do things happen. Hospitals are often targets of malware, because they are a publicly-accessible place, full of WiFi gadgets. Lapses in security at a hospital are because security is not as high of priority as patient safety and physical hygiene. A few seconds of delay to login to something might mean the difference between someone surviving and dying.

 

Most other schools and offices are not like that. You have the time to consider what you're doing. You will be held responsible for security oversights. In a Hospital, a doctor or nurse who is bringing a computer to a patient's room to do something, isn't going to spend a few minutes figuring out how to login to it, chances are the security to anything portable is non-existent (indeed the infusion pumps that trickle a drug into a patient, are often still just Wireless-G equipment, but they are also one-way broadcasts.) Only clerical work tends to have more than a "click ok to login"

 

Hence, you don't want public internet access available in those places. All it takes is someone plugging in their internet-enabled cell phone into a computer on the network and suddenly the entire entire network potentially is on the internet. The computer it's plugged into could then act as a bridge to the internet. Now fortunately that is not something that is possible by accident. If you turn internet sharing on your cell phone and plug it into a desktop computer, at best, the computer sees another ethernet device, and it gives access to the internet only to that computer, but because of the nature of multi-homing, it may actually cause software on the desktop to broadcast to internet instead of the intranet. 

 

So, in theory, yes there are ways of unintentionally infecting a computer or an entire network using a cell phone, but you'd have to do this intentionally, and the computer's it's plugged into would need a higher level of access than you normally would if proper security hygiene is done. In most cases, people are too trusting, and if you really wanted something from someone, you could quite literately ask. Social engineering is much easier done over the phone when the victim can't see you.

 

So, "yes, but unlikely without a lot of coincidences"