Habitat 1.0.0.70 adds new Wifi Location Scanner

[Cubert]

Today we released build 1.0.0.70 out to the net. You should start auto updating over the next few hours and after relaunching a new console you should see the new tool.


We added a new tool to Habitat that is available at any "location" where an active agent is using Wifi.

The scanner sees the active agent and will execute a small script that takes just seconds to complete. It quickly captures the devices it sees on the active wifi adaptor on the agent and imports them into the Automate database where we keep track them.

An active location may look some thing like this:

WifiScanner_Location_View.PNG (47.7 KiB) Viewed 6912 times

Showing you the game systems, Audio(Listening Devices), Cell phones, TV and Smart card devices, PC, switches and routers. See when they showed up on the network, if they are still on the network and when the last time we saw them on the network.

This is all useful information when you need to know how network resources at a given location are being utilized.


See the official document page for WiFi Scanner viewtopic.php?f=64&t=5851&sid=f66840be0 ... 36a0236eb1

[JvdMaat]

Two questions.
One, we definitely got this update yesterday, as we got pulled in to a security breach incident at one of our customers because they flagged the nirsoft download (and XML creation) as an issue in their tools.
While this is totally legit use, they made a fair point that with most employees working from home, scanning people's home network is an invasion (and potential overstepping) of privacy.
So my first question is two-fold. Can we get better notification (aside from a forum post that I don't check daily) when new functionality comes out. (so we're not scrambling to identify what set off our customer's SIEM toolkits). And could we potentially disable this WiFi scanning at a Client or Location level?
(And a third follow up they just asked, can we disable all Habitat functionality for a single Client?)

And second question, while we definitely have the script running, I do not see the new tab on any Locations:

2021-04-28 11_27_08-MUSA - Waltham (LocationID_ 12).png (7.74 KiB) Viewed 6812 times

How do we see what info it's actually gathering?

[Cubert]

As for first issue?

We agree that there is more work to be done on the scanner options, we will be introducing the ability to exclude agents and or locations in future releases. As you all have seen, Habitat updates regularly so I would suspect some of these to come pretty quickly.


Second issue "Can we get better notification ",

This has been a double edge sword for us. Our systems has some limits (being a hosted service) where when we update the digital assets (plugin zip file) it will ask to make an announcement of availability. The limitation is that its all or nothing. This means everyone who has ever purchased Habitat active or not will get a notice that updates have been posted. In the early days of the plugin this would be fine but you get 2 or 3 years down the road and you have hundreds of MSPs that have come and gone or moved to different platforms that will line your inbox with complaints of spamming. So we have opted to keep very active (daily) on our forums with announcements of availability and what to expect with updates.

We also allow you to prevent auto updates of the plugin so it will not update and cause you issues in the manor it has. This way if you want you can check forums before updating and see all the Habitat 1.0.0.xxx posts to see what's changed since your last update. Then you can manually update via the web portal downloads for this plugin.

We do recognize the potential privacy issues with remote users although you could debate that any thing the automate agent collects from remote device (laptop/PC) is cause for violation or not if subscribed to MSPs services offerings.

[Cubert]

As for where it populates?, Make sure to close your control centers and relaunch them, login again and look at each "Locations".

This tab should be showing up under each location if an agent at location has a wifi adapter.

Make sure that the local control center version of Habitat is 1.0.0.70. If not you will not have that control yet locally.

This maybe a stuck dll then, which you will want to manually delete from c:\programdata\labtechplugins\my-RMM-URL\Habitat.dll

Delete this DLL and then relaunch the control center again. It will download the Habitat DLL from the Automate host and update the control center.

[Cubert]

We are going to release 1.0.0.71 later today.

It will now include the new feature for the WIFI scanner

viewtopic.php?p=8533&sid=85e9403808ef3e ... 921c#p8533

This should help resolve some of your concerns with control over scanner.

[PeterD]

Hello,

I have a couple of questions in regards to this new Wifi location scanner since it triggered a lot of alerts on our Antivirus software.

• What is it reporting and how? How is the information reported and recorded? Is it saved somewhere else other than Automate?

• Is there anything that needs to be done aside from checking "Disable Location Scanning" to completely disable it? Is there a way to do this across the board or for every client with one click or do we have to do this per location. If we disable it does that mean it will be removed from the clients endpoints that it was originally deployed on?

• If we do disable the location scanning, will that interfere with anything else on Habitat?

Thank you in advance.
Peter

[Cubert]

#1 the scan app is a common web tool so I can understand some AV apps may see it as such. We use it to create a xml of the data and import that into automate. Only automate has this info.

#2 the plug-in scripts each scan so if you disable either the location or the habitat service for WiFi scanning. The main shut off is under the habitat automated services control in main habitat console.

#3 you can disable and not effect anything else in Habitat. WiFi is independent.

If you remove the files created by scanning at agent and disable scanner then files will not appear on agent again

[MarkHodges]

Bitdefender is picking up the nursoft tool as a virus all over the place for us...

[Cubert]

We updated tool to start in the off position now.

You will need to open Automated services tool and enable wifi scanner going forward.

[bmcfarlane]

We had the false security alerts as well. Maybe by default you can leave any new feature off vs. on and then we can turn it on as we evaluate the fit for our clients and if it will cause side effects. Having automatic rollout of anything is something we don't like to do without alot of testing. Thanks!