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If you use Wi-Fi, READ :P

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Evilgoat:
I realise this is probobly in the wrong place but for obvious reasonsI'd like people to see this and think.

This afternoon I went out with a laptop and GPS for a 5 min drive round the imediate area, what you see below is the result. This is with the laptop in the footwell, worst possible location, and no real effort applied.

103 Access points total found with :

23 open, no protection at all, this means their Internet connection is available along with their firewall having been negated and any machines running network shares visible to the world. This is VERY VERY stupid unless you know what you are doing. MAC filtering doesnt help, your traffic is still in the clear and liable to snooping. There have been two court cases recently where spammers have used open points like this to send vast amounts of spam. There is also noises being made about people downloading kiddie porn this way too.

If your access point is open, close it, NOW if you dont now how, get help.

60 points, Hardware was easilly identifiable. This means that if there is a known exploit for your box or a back door, an attacker will know how to get in right off the bat, less work, easier target and thus more attractive. Make the SSID/Name something unique and not identifiable to you or the hardware. 3more went on to include the model number. Its also means if you've kept the defaults the attacker now knows all the passwords and keys to get in.

74 Apeared to be using out of the box, default settings with BT Homehubs being the worst offenders here. As above, it means I have 90% of the info I need to get in.

8 had their physical location fairly easilly identifiable with one including its street address. The yelss out 'I have lots of expensive kit here, at least one PC and probobly a laptop too. Dont do it.

Use Wi-Fi when you have no alternative, cables behave better anyway. If you must use it make the SSID something unique and unrelated to you to a stranger, dont use model numbers, vendor names, house names, street addresses or surnames. Use at least 128bit WEP and MAC access control, if possible use WPA and another form of access control. 64Bit WEP is trivial to bypass and 128 Bit isnt much harder, but it stops casual attacks.

I'm posting this as given I wasnt even trying particular hard, and certainly not as hard as someone who wanted to get in would, I could have caused mayhem. I was actually shocked to find that many vunerable networks! 5 Minutes and I have memory map plot of where they all are.

And before you ask, the data isnt available and I wont tell anyone the kit used :)

schuee:
Hi Evilgoat

Funny you should post about this subject, today a work colleague and I did exactly the same thing, with a new sub notebook to test its wireless ability.We drove around the bypass in Newark and back through the town centre, we could not believe how many unsecure networks appeared, and the majority had either the default name of router, ie Netgear, D-Link etc or the house number or company name as their SSID :shock:

freelanderpx54:
I haven't sorted out my internet connection at the new house yet but being offline won't be an issue as some kind soul has an unsecure router which is allowing me 54 Mbps   :roll:

It would be churlish not to take advantage :lol:

landroverkeith:
:shock:  how do ya know if ya open or closed with the doover thingy then?? took me a week to get this extremly "special" :roll:  pc to connect to the modem in the first place i dont wanna fart arse around with it again and naff it up lol hehehe but at same time lol no one use my network lol

DarrenG:

--- Quote from: "freelanderpx54" ---I haven't sorted out my internet connection at the new house yet but being offline won't be an issue as some kind soul has an unsecure router which is allowing me 54 Mbps   :roll:

It would be churlish not to take advantage :lol:
--- End quote ---

And also a criminal offence if you are caught  :?

I use a WLAN because it is impractical to have network cables all over the house, but I know how to secure it and I run a hardware firewall.  When implemented correctly it's a secure system but I agree about the issue.  Manufacturers are as much to blame.  These units should be locked down out of the box and the setup should force users to secure them before they can be used.

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