This one made me laugh and cringe at the same time. I laughed because either someone thought this was cool or just brain dead.
Serious people, if you are going to bring a WiFi AP or name your endpoint something like "Bomb on Board", then you are seriously asking
for trouble. Was this meant to be a prank? No matter how you look at it, it is just plain wrong.
If you travel on an airplane and set up something like this, you are not funny and will anger not only the passengers, flight attendants and Captain and co-pilot, you will also be the focal point of an investigation delaying all of the passengers and flight crew. Ever seen the reactions of passengers delayed and missing their flights, connections, etc? Not a pretty sight.
Whatever device was used to do this , they should have recorded the MAC address of the device. Yes, granted that MAC addresses can be spoofed, but what exactly was this? A laptop or a device? Either way if caught you could be facing serious charges.
So I would assume that every passenger was searched for an AP, Laptop, Cell phone (yes many cell phones today allow you to be a Wireless AP) or MiFi. If you were dumb enough to keep that SSID, then you deserve everything thrown at you. Most likely the person who did this changed their SSID, but a savvy person could have already recorded more information to help the authorities. I hope that this was the case.
However, the flip side of this is "testing the waters" by nefarious people. Get someone to do this for you and see the reaction. Measure the reaction against whatever your devious plans are. Think about this for a second. If one third of all flights had someone do this as a coordinated effort, it may cripple the response time especially if done at 1 or 2 airports. Again, "testing the water" are always done for both good an bad intentions.
The article states that this is not the first time this happened. Granted both times the incident occurred overseas, so I lean towards "testing the waters" on this one. But I could be wrong (I hope I am). With the advent of the WiFi Pineapple and other WiFi Surveillance Devices which can be used as a "man in the middle" passive device to collect user accounts and credit cards, etc., who knows the reasoning behind this. It happens and there needs to be countermeasures in place to capture information to pinpoint where this is coming from.
No matter how you look at this incidence, it is just plain wrong to do this.
