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Mobile devices use these probe requests to receive information about nearby Wi-Fi access points and establish connections to them when a probe response is received.
Attackers that can sniff network traffic, the academics say, can use these probe requests to track and identify devices, and even pinpoint their location.
According to them, roughly a quarter of probe requests contain the Service Set Identifier (SSIDs) of networks the devices were previously connected to, which could be used to reveal home addresses or visited locations.