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Growth of Wi-Fi Opens New Path for Thieves
E. Harley writes "Wi-Fi connections are popping up all over the place from retails locations, schools, municipalities, and homes. Unintentionally or not, most of these wi-fi hot spots never change the system's default settings, hide the connection from others, or encrypt the data sent over it. This NY Times article [Free registration required] talks about the size and extent of the problem, and what has happened with law enforcement investigating criminals using these public connections. Also, the article updates us on an earlier Slashdot story about wardriving. That case is still pending."
When criminals operate online through a Wi-Fi network, law enforcement agents can track their activity to the numeric Internet Protocol address corresponding to that connection. But from there the trail may go cold, in the case of a public network, or lead to an innocent owner of a wireless home network.
After reading the article, it gives me the impression that you have a license to do just about any illegal internet activity so long as your WiFi router uses the default SSID, broadcasts its SSID and keeps the default passwords. If anything is traced back to you, you just blame the WiFi-Boogeyman for any illegal activities originating from your IP address.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Hm... maybe I should have downloaded that 35GB Simpsons torrent on a neighbors wireless internet. Ooops.
Schlep your lappy to a Starbucks, tap into the wifi, and fire up Driftnet (linux) or EtherPEG (mac). Watch what flies by... hours of entertainment.
Speak truth to power.
While I understand that Joe Six Pack wants plug and play functionality without configuring, it is really that hard to add in another layer? When the AP is running on factory settings, it can just cause all Web requests to route to the configuration page along with an easy to explain set up about passwords. AP passwords aren't hard as normal passwords since many APs are in a secure building so writing the password on the AP and locking it in the closet would work half decently.
While the user has to take some blame for technical ignorance, the AP makers also have to take some blame here since they have the tech people to implement better security.
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Wired article as proof
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/19/technology/19wif i.html?ex=1268888400&en=51d90e7518bba5d6&ei=5090&p artner=rssuserland/
Now, I realize that I'm the exception, but how hard can it be to type 192.168.1.1 in a web browser? Of course, people should check the air pressure in their tires once a week, and clean the air filter on the furnace once in a while...
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
This is the same RIAA arguement from before in a diffrent context.
Some people like to share we should encorage that... The best possible solution is for the router to limit bandwidth to outside connections (length of use = more bandwidth? First 2 users connected get most bandwidth?)
Even windows doesn't have sharing on by default... Allowing users to sit behind your firewall isn't a huge deal, there are tonnes of users sharing their windows dir on Kazaa or whatever if someone wanted to be malicious they should.
There is some importance in making life better for other people, if you don't when you go on a camping trip people around you will be weighing how hungry bears are against the $ in your wallet.
The banks are not using secure authentication systems and WiFi users are getting blamed?
:]
Tell me.. When did it become my fault that someone can download tens of thousands of customer credit cards? Perhaps if these credit cards had been ditched long before the Internet we wouldn't be having that problem. Kerberos, challenge-response, PKI, and two-factor authentication devices have all been available for quite some time.
Someone tell the Secret Service to stop monitoring IRC connections and go after lazy banks instead, or something
What's needed is a layer of hardware-based identification on all internet-capable computers, which would be tied to the user's fingerprint and all of the user's actions would be logged by a central database. That way, any actions are have not been approved by the government or any corporation, would be immediately logged and the subject could be immediately arrested and shipped off to Syria/Lebanon/Turkey for tort***... i mean interrogation.
After these latter measures are in place, we can all be perfectly secure in knowing that no porn, violence, homosexual acts, books about evolution, untampered news, or any worthwhile content is being viewed by anyone in the U.S.
P.S. Or we could just make encryption and wifi security easy to implement and show people how to use it.
P.P.S. Nah... the former solution seems a lot more comprehensive in terms of public oppression... I mean security.
MAC addresses are not unspoofable.
Hooray for double negatives!
Everybody is forgetting each and every ethernet adapter has a unique serial number/address, called the MAC address. It would be very easy to prove/disprove you were the one or not by that address.
Google "etherchange" and see what you get... Here is the first hit... MAC addresses don't prove diddley...
Mister Transistor, yours is a common misconception. Your workstation's address is never transmitted outside your local network.
To the world outside your local network, every MAC address coming from your local network appears to be the same one - the one of your router. Any such WiFi Boogeyman would appear to have the same exact MAC address as you.
As for the "more sophisticated tracking"... There are some things that can be done but to be honest they're not very sophisticated. Suffice it to say that you could very easily get away with doing just about anything you want if the law enforcement-types are in any way ready to believe that someone other than you might have done it through your network.
I'm a big tall mofo.
This problem could be reduced dramatically if WAPs shipped from the factory with complex random passwords WEP enabled and complex random WEP keys.
As an example on a new HPaq server the iLO remore management interface has complex random password, printed on a label on the device.
Imagine if Linksys, etc. did the same thing with WAPs, where no 2 WAPs with the same WEP key or password.
Sure some users would just disable the protection but I'm betting if you made it halfway convienient that most won't. Make it more work to be insecure and the security will win most of the time. You might even be able to reduce this further by having the admin interface give you lots of warnings and make you jump through hopps to disable the security funcions.
Of course secrity could be improved upon even further if the default security was better than WEP but I think that's too high a barrier for the average user to tolerate. WEP may suck but it's considerably better than wide open.
Well than, since 90% of Slashdot users do not pirate intellectual property, I can only assume that you already own a legally purchased copy of the Simpson's episode in question, and thus this would be "fair use". Right?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Part of the problem is that the manufacturers don't disable anything by default...instead, you can literally plug a wireless router in and it'll instantly work assuming your internet connection uses DHCP to get its IP address.
Perhaps the easiest way to solve this problem is to disable the wireless part of the router until you run the setup program (or even better, make it launch the browser so it will work on any OS) and make you go through the steps of enabling encryption and everything.
I have WPA enabled on my wireless router (a Linksys WRT54G with the latest firmware) and MAC filtering. I broadcast my SSID ("Break this"), but that is more for ease of use then anything.
I then enabled SSL for the admin pages, so I must type https://192.168.1.1/ (the actual IP is different) to reach the router's admin page. I figure between SSL and WPA, it will be pretty hard for someone to break into my router's admin page.
The key is, with WPA and MAC filtering that will keep out all but the most determined out. If they ever got past that and onto my wireless network, I have logs so I could manually block them.
i'll play devil's advocate, for a minute:
the airwaves are supposed to be public.
therefore, if there's a "thief," the thief would be the group that cordones the public airwaves off and claims them as their own private property.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
We have a Python script on our laptops that send netstat, ipconfig, route info via email when they boot. When a laptop is stolen and the thief is dumb enough to use it online, we can subponea the ISP and walk to their door. But the last one that was stolen was in an apartment building that had 5 or 6 open WAPS. We knew that the laptop was in one of the apartments, but the cops could not get a search warrant for all the apartments within 150' radius of the open WAP that the stolen laptop was on... long story short, they got away with it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/19/technology/19wif i.html?ex=1268888400&en=51d90e7518bba5d6&ei=5090&p artner=rssuserland
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Notice that the NY Times NEVER questions whether there could be an ulterior motive to associating wifi with theft, child porn, and terrorism. This TImes articles is a propaganda piece aimed to associating wifi with Bad Things. This propaganda piece is likely bought and paid for by the telcos and cable lobbies who are using propaganda like this to shut dowm possible competition.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Notice that this article goes out of its way to associate the following practices with wifi:
--theft
--child porn
--terrorism
And the article here never even questions whether associating these practices with wifi could be a subterfuge by the telcos and cable companies to demonizes wifi so as to be able to outlaw municipal wifi through legislation, which is what they are afraid of, as that will cause them to cut their broadband prices.
This whole article is a propaganda piece, bought and paid for by the vested interests, such as telcos and cable companies.
What a sham is the NY Times. Just another cog in the CorpGovMedia propaganda machine...
eat shiat and bark at the moon
There's no tax, there aren't even rules like in CB. I could set up a radio station on the wifi bands and broadcast 24/7. I wouldn't, as no one has a radio that can tune it in, but I could.
It's law enforcement that's complaining here, and the FCC does not investigate crimes.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
This problem could be reduced dramatically if WAPs shipped from the factory with complex random passwords WEP enabled and complex random WEP keys.
The incentive for the manufacturers is for wireless access points to NOT be secure out-of-the-box.
If it's not secure, it's plug-and-play. Plug it in, it's up. If it's more secure, it makes instalation (to the point of getting traffic through it) more difficult.
Insecurity doesn't affect the user until they get burned - mainly by lower performance as their bandwidth gets leached (assuming their important applications, like banking, already use end-to-end encryption). Leaching might not even be noticed. If it is, they can diagnose it and tighten things up.
Security impacts ease-of-use, and thus sales.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Notice that this NY Times article quotes "anonymous" government sources in their attempt to associate wifi with terrorism. This is the typical attempt to use terrorism to demonize a competitor. THe telcos and cable companies lobbies almost certainly paid off someone at the NY Times to get them to write this article. Now they will use this article when thieir lobbyists meet with state governments trying to get them to pass laws that make municipal wifi illegal. This is just the first step in manufacturing consent for shutting down cheap competition. This is American "free market" capitalism in action. Really, it is corporate socialism--socialism for the big corporations and their billionaires; free market cpapitalism for all of us peons. Or, rather, feudalism for us, as we are essentially being sold as consumers to the telcos and cable companies.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Sorry...not happening. I don't want to be in the position of having to defend myself, for something I had no part in, that I could have easily prevented.
Notice how this NY Times articles is careful to associate each of this poisonous trio of ID Theft-ChildPorn-Terrorism with...WiFi.
And what a coincidence that just as this article is being published, that all over America, state governments are trying to decide whether to outlaw municipal wifi. Of course, this drive to outlaw municipal wifi is in NO WAY connected to this article that tends to associate wifi with THEFT, CHILD PORN, and TERRORISM. And in no way would the telco and cable TV lobbies that stand to lose BILLIONS (if municipal wifi takes off) try to get the NY Times to help make wifi look bad.
No way the media would do that! They have integrity. They would never sell out to the telco-cableTV lobby like that.
Would they?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
It is disgusting to see someone writing FUD and bullshit like this while others are volunteering their time, efforts, and money to help build free community WiFi networks.
Instead of cultivating even more paranoia in our country what we really need is more trust, pioneers, and heroes who help build free WiFi networks.
I am running an open access point for everyone to use and I am happy to find the same whenever I am on the road.
Lets all be reasonable and not spread FUD but support the urgently needed free WiFi access.
Most people, spoiled by plug and play, expect to plug it in and be just fine. From my wardriving experiences, still around 70% of APs are unsecure, and that's helped by buisnesses which have a very high secure rate (only about 5 to 10% I come across are open). About 90% of residential APs are open. It's really not that hard to secure an AP. WEP + Mac filtering ... bonus points for secure VPN.
Even though it's very weak, even just having WEP is enough for your average person... why would a 1337 h4x0r bother to take the type to break your WEP when the next idiot down the road doesn't even have that?
And please, do the world a favor... put in something for the SSID other than default, linksys, or leaving the SSID blank. Having a blank SSID is a very false sense of security... all it does is make it harder for legit users to connect, contribute to confusion (two people close together without SSIDs), and is really very easy to notice.
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recent data thefts from ChoicePoint
Nothing was stolen from ChoicePoint. They sold data to person or persons they should not have. There was no 'break in' as has been reported elsewhere. The only 'hacking' involved was social.
As a consultant, I regularly deal with this issue. Customer says: "Why dont we go wireless? Wouldnt it be easier" I says: "Do you know that there are actually people who drive around looking for wireless connections to hack into and steal data?" Call me a bit paranoid, but I actually met a couple of hard-line coders/hackers who did this, trolling for useful data. While there are security features to lock down the WiFi by MAC address and you can further challenge access with passwords, for a business with valuable data (these are accountants, lawyers, financial professionals), going wireless when your computers are in a fixed position on your desk just seems to me like a whole lot of work so you dont have to run a cable. While I hate pulling cable, I'd hate to have them try to sue me for leaving their data unsecured!
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I run an open access point, I password protected the config interface and check occasionally to see if anyone is using it - but really I don't care. I always have enough bandwidth when I need it, so why not share? If anyone uses it for something illegal I know I can't be held liable and I don't have any logs of what goes on with it, maybe someday I'll get hassled by the cops or the MPAA, but I'll deal with that if it ever comes.
Link here, among other places.
To take the other side...
What's with open, public roads that anyone is allowed to use? My friends were tied up and robbed the other day, and the thieves used public roads to do it!
We really need to crack down on usage of public roads.
Seriously, as if getting on the internet anonymously was EVER hard.. sure, wifi makes it a bit easier, but it's far, far from a new thing.
It seems wholly possible, even likely, that open WiFis pose opportunities for people to commit crimes while making it harder for law enforcement to stop them. Is this worth the benefit of free, widely available Internet access? Are there technical or legal steps we can take to tighten the holes these networks open to maximize their potential? These are real questions that deserve thoughtful consideration, rather than just screaming "FUD!".
Lets all be reasonable and not spread FUD but support the urgently needed free WiFi access. Yes, let's be reasonable. Cheap AIDS medication in the third world is "urgently needed". Cheap Internet access in the US is not "urgently needed".