It seems that Wi-Fi drivers can put laptops at a greater risk of being hacked. Recently, some people have found a way to seize control of a laptop computer by manipulating buggy code in the system's wireless device driver. But don't you worry, these people are security researchers and they come in peace.

The hack will be demonstrated at the upcoming Black Hat USA 2006 conference during a presentation by David Maynor, a research engineer with Internet Security Systems and Jon Ellch, a student at the U.S. Naval postgraduate school in Monterey, California.

In the world of hacking, device driver hacking is technically challenging but with the emergence of  new software tools that make it easier for less technically savvy hackers, a.k.a script kiddies, to attack wireless cards, the field of device driver hacking is gaining some attention in the past years.

The two "researchers"  used an open-source 802.11 hacking tool called LORCON (Loss of Radio Connectivity) to throw an extremely large number of wireless packets at different wireless cards. Using the fuzzing technique, they want to see if they can cause programs to fail, or perhaps even run unauthorized software when they are bombarded with unexpected data.

While completing their conquest, they were able to discover many examples of wireless device driver flaws, including one that allowed them to take over a laptop by exploiting a bug in an 802.11 wireless driver. They also examined other networking technologies including Bluetooth, Ev-Do (EVolution-Data Only), and HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access).

Wireless devices are often built to constantly find new networks. This innate characteristic can lead to security problems, and in fact researchers in Italy recently created a project known as BlueBag, to emphasize this point. What they try to do is show just how many vulnerable Bluetooth wireless devices they could connect with by wandering around public spaces like airports and shopping malls. After spending about 23 hours wandering about Milan alone, they had found more than 1,400 devices that were open to connection.

So with these, the two hackers are willing to help out engineers who write device driver to always put security as the top priority so as to prevent hacking. The Black Hat USA 2006 conference will be held on August 2, 2006.