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Wireless Hijacker Dealt First UK Punishment
paella_dodger writes "The BBC is reporting on a recent UK court case whereby a man was fined £500, sentenced to 12 months' conditional discharge and had his laptop confiscated for browsing the 'net on his neighbour's wireless Internet conenction. Perhaps I should secure my neighbour's wireless connection for him before Windows automagically connects to it and gets me arrested!"
Perhaps, but the same logic still applies; this guy was not just stealing it, he was making himself a target to be caught.
He is obviously not very smart, either, considering he was seen for the past three months in the same locations. That usualy means he was using the same network for the same deeds each time.
Honestly, I do not blame the UK government for going down on this guy; he deserves it. Especially since he was stupid enough to get caught the way he did. Sure, war driving is one thing, but blatently sitting infront of someone's home, leeching their network is a whole different case.
Sadly, this is just like what happened to the term "hacker" back in the day - it was idiots, like this guy, that ruined it for the real "hackers" out there; the script kiddies. Now, guys like this, and the other guy that got caught doing it, will give the term "war driving" a bad name. Hell, you mention "war driving" somewhere and people are going to start believing you're a "hacker" who uses "linux" to steal credit cards from them.
All in all, people should learn to secure their wireless networks. If they are unable to, or know nothing about the processes, they should be wired like the other drones. Or they should simply hire someone to secure it for them -- It's honestly not that difficult these days, especially with a linksys router. You simply type in a few things and click a coulpe check boxes and you're done. But this does prove that the common person, joe sixpack if you will, does not care enough about computer security to do anything until someone takes advantage of them. Then they cry foul.
"Fortunately, most courts still discriminate between intentionally and accidentally doing something. "
Except for one thing, you can't know if he neighbours INTENT was to share his open wireless connection for sharing. Thats the whole point of Open WiFi afterall, sharing. By doing this they're making Open WiFi illegal, because not only does your computer have to get permission to connect to the network (via the login) but now extra permission is needed too.
Let me put it another way. Suppose you have free open municiple wifi and Fred Bloggs open wifi, you computer has no way of telling which is the free Municiple open wifi and which is not so it connects to Fred Blogs's net, attempts to login and is given permission -> crime comitted. You had the intent to connect to an open network, but not the method to determine which network is permitted.
Or rather you did have the way, the login, but the court ignored that.
Geeks need to get out of the habit of assuming that a default configuration amounts to "permission to use". It doesn't. Only permission to use is permission to use. The only surefire way to know if you have permission or not to use a network is to look for a publically posted notice, or to get written or oral permission from the network's owner. One day, 802.11* might have something added to make it easier to make it possible for a user to unambigiously give other's permission to use their networks (and that would be a useful feature anyway), but until then, look for notices, or talk to the operator. Don't assume.
That wireless routers ship unsecured in their default configuration is a problem with the vendors (and it wasn't always like this). Vendors do this to make it easier for people to setup their first wireless network... in fact it's basically automatic. Any Windows machine with a wireless card will automatically connect to any unsecured wireless access point. Period. Allow me to repeat this. Any Windows machine with a wireless card will automatically connect to any unsecured wireless access point. But people really do need to log in and change the default configuration, both for security purposes (it's trivially easy to find default passwords online), and functionality reasons. But the biggest reason is that the way to say something is available for use in the online world is to allow people to use it without authentication.
The standard way of saying something is open and available on the 'net is to not require a password. If you put your pictures up on your http site even if you don't publish the link anywhere you're giving your consent for people to connect and look at your pictures. Not just your consent... your hardware, which is your stand-in online, is actively doing it. The moment you put a password on your http site, you're showing that the site is private, and attempts to enter can be considered hacking. If you have an FTP site with no password, you're giving people permission to use it. Open chat servers, bulletin boards, p2p nodes... The universally accepted convention about networking protocols is "open unless locked." I don't need to call you and get your explicit permission to connect to your website if it isn't locked... by not having a password on something you are showing that it is available for all to use. This post bounced through 20 or so routers at various locations throughout the world, but I didn't need to get explicit permission to use any of them. I didn't have to: I had implicit permission built into the hardware's choice of protocol.
Likewise, if you have networking hardware that has no password or protection whatsoever, you're giving people permission to route through it. In fact, hardware you own is more than facilitating it... it's broadcasting its SSID, it's responding to my card's MAC address, it's responding to my session handshake, and it's not asking for authentication. That's no less than four steps along the line when it could have simply and trivially stopped anyone whom the owner didn't want on the network. The hardware actively engaged in the process. This isn't like checking everyone's door to see which is unlocked, this is like walking past a building downtown and having the glass door automatically open for you.
I should also say that lots of people do intentionally share their wireless networks, out of a sense of social support. There are several 802.11b networks permeating my apartment right now, several of which have altered SSID's and configurations but which are unlocked all the same, showing that the owners knew enough to change the configuration of their routers but still chose to leave them unlocked. This turned out to be good for me, as I had been unintentionally connecting to a neighbor's wireless network for about 1/2 of a year... My wireless card had a faulty WEP driver, and for half a year I didn't notice that it would fail to connect to my network and automatically went out and found another
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