While we don’t think this qualifies as a “fail”, it’s certainly not a triumph. But that’s what happens when you notice something funny and start to investigate: if you’re lucky, it ends with “Eureka!”, but most of the time it’s just “oh”. Still, it’s good to record the “ohs”.
Gökberk [gkbrk] Yaltıraklı was staying in a hotel long enough that he got bored and started snooping around the network, like you do. Breaking out Wireshark, he noticed a lot of UDP traffic on a nonstandard port, so he thought he’d have a look.
A couple of quick Python scripts later, he had downloaded a number of the sample packets and decoded them into hex and found the signature for LAME, an MP3 encoder. He played around with byte offsets until he got a valid MP3 file out, and voilà, the fantastic reveal! It was the hotel’s elevator music stream — that he could hear outside in the corridor with much less effort. (Sad trombone.)
But just because nothing came up this time doesn’t mean that nothing will come up next time. And it’s important to keep your skills sharp for when you really need them. We love following along with peoples’ reverse engineering efforts, whether or not they end up finding anything. What oddball signals have you found lately?
Thanks [leonardo] for the tip! Wireshark graphic from Softpedia’s entry on Wireshark. Simulated-phosphor audio display by Oona [windytan] Räisänen (check that out!).
Filed under: digital audio hacks, security hacks, slider
