Wi-Fi Piggybacking Widespread

BaCa sent in this article about stealing network access that opens, "Sophos has revealed new research into the use of other people's Wi-Fi networks to piggyback onto the internet without payment. The research shows that 54 percent of computer users have admitted breaking the law, by using someone else's wireless internet access without permission." Of course, online polls being what they are, the results are hardly a plank for a full investigation, but a good share of the answerers did 'fess up to it as well.

Comments

54 percent??!?

[thermopile]

Oh, come on .. I can't believe it's not more like 90 or 95 percent. In fact, I'm typing this while "borrowing" my neighbor's linksys network. The admi-- $$%110113944 NO CARRIER

Re:54 percent??!?

[RuBLed]

You mean like her? Mrs. Roberts

MP3s are a gateway item

[Anonymous Coward]

You start by just stealing that one song. Then another, then another. Pretty soon your stealing movies, games, operating systems. Now you move up to what's known as speedballing - stealing songs using someone elses wifi. You try to hide your addiction by using proxies, but you can't hide from your own thoughts. Sooner or later, you'll be stealing large chunks of the internet. And one day - one day - you'll be found dead in alley clutching your hacked iPhone and box of sim chips. The police probably won't even investigate your death.

Re:Encryption

[jamesh]

I was helping out someone over the phone at a client's remote office. He'd just come back from overseas and could connect to the wireless network and access the internet but couldn't connect to any of the internal systems. After checking all the obvious things I established a remote control session to his laptop and started looking around. The IP address of the wireless interface was nothing like what it should have been. I then connected to the Access point he was using and found that it was set up nothing like it should have been and DHCP was enabled. Aha! I thought. The Access point has been reset to factory defaults. I threw a new config at it and rebooted it, but things still weren't working right.

Eventually, I figured out that while he was away, someone in a neighboring office must have set up an access point with the same SSID (NETGEAR - so the chances of it happening were pretty high!) and his laptop decided to connect to that instead. And i'd just reconfigured it with a fairly high level of security. Oops.

Oh well... maybe next time their neighbor will put security on their access point!

Wifi Sharing

[photomonkey]

In 2004, I was covering the Presidential debate and Kerry rally following it in Phoenix.

The press facilities at the debate were adequate, but sucked nine kinds of ass at the Kerry rally.

As per company policy, I FTP'd my photos in following the event only to find out that most of them were received as corrupted.

So I drove around with my laptop on the passenger seat looking for an open wireless point. I drove past a house with every light on, and an open access point. Since the light was on, I decided to ring the doorbell to let the homeowner know who was camped out in front of their driveway with a laptop.

The guy came to the door and said the wireless was 'obviously' open for all to use, since he didn't lock it down. He told me I was welcome to come in and sit in the house while I worked, provided that he and his wife could look over my shoulder at the pictures.

I accidently reconfigured my neighbor's router

[MichaelCrawford]

My landlady said I could use her wireless (she lived upstairs from me) but both she and a neighbor, who I never identified, had unsecured wireless, with both networks being named "linksys". They also used two different ISPs.

My MacBook Pro's Airport card connected to each network more or less at random. When I connected to her's, it worked OK, but when I connected to her neighbor's, it didn't work at all. Sometimes the Airport would switch networks in the middle of my use of the Internet, which really got to be a drag.

So I finally convinced her to let me rename and secure her access point. This went very well, and I was able to set up both my Mac and her WinXP laptop to use the newly secured net.

Except that I made a crucial mistake: I performed the re-configuration wirelessly. I didn't do it by plugging an ethernet cable into her access point.

Imagine my dismay when I realized I had reconfigured her neighbor's access point, and not her's!

I sat in my room quaking with fear, awaiting the heavy bootheels of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police kicking down my door so they could haul me in for being a cyberterrorist.

I never heard any complaints though, and eventually my neighbor's network was renamed to "linksys" and was again unsecured. My guess is that LinkSys tech support explained how to do a hard reset.

My question for my Slashdot friends is this: who is the Rocket Scientist at LinkSys who decided to support wireless reconfiguration of their routers?

Re:I agree its wrong

[dwater]

and I like to have mine open and free too so my neighbours can access it if they so like. I named my access point the same as my phone number just so people would now who to call if there was a problem. One woman called me to angrily ask me why my phone number was on her desktop - in a very accusing kind of way, like I'd been {cr,h}acking her system or something.

So, you're saying I could then have had her arrested for stealing my bandwidth? Rediculous.