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Australian Police Plan Wardriving Mission

Posted by timothy on from the village-green-preservation-society dept.

bfire writes "Police officers in the Australian state of Queensland plan to conduct a 'wardriving' mission around select towns in an effort to educate citizens to secure their wireless networks. When unsecured networks are found, the Police will pay a friendly visit to the household or small business, informing them of the risks they are exposing themselves to. Officers also hope to return to surveyed areas within a month to see if users have fixed their security settings. The idea is modeled on another campaign where officers walk around railway stations checking cars have been locked, and leaving notes warning people of the dangers involved with leaving their vehicles unsecured."

3 of 340 comments (clear)

  1. Knock, knock... by ekran · · Score: 5, Funny

    Oh, there are a lot of strange ways this could play out:

    [ knock, knock ]
    -Do you have the WLAN with the SSID MonkeyTails?
    -The what, Sir?
    -Wireless Network?
    -Oh, for the computer Internet? No, I think ours is called captaincrook.
    -Okay, that one is safe.
    -Safe?
    -Yeah, we are driving around checking for insecure WLANs. Do you know who MonkeyTails are?
    -I think it's my neighbour.
    -Ok, thank you.
    [ knock, knock ]
    - Hello.
    - Hello, are you the owner of the WLAN MonkeyTails?
    - Yes?
    - It's insecure.
    - I know.
    - Well, you should secure it.
    - No, I don't want to secure it.
    - You should secure it or pedophiles could use it.
    - It is an old router that doesn't support encryption.
    - Well, let us know if you see any pedophiles.
    - Bye.

  2. Re:Aiding and Abetting? by Bert64 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well, the police also lock the cars as well as putting notes on them...

    A friend of mine got hit by this, he had an old car which used 2 keys - one to open the door, and one to start the engine... He had lost the door key, but still had the engine one, so he simply left the car unlocked. Being an old, rusty and totally worthless looking vehicle it never got stolen, and he never left anything in it worth stealing either. It wasn't a problem until the cops came along and locked him out of it.

    --
    http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
  3. Re:yes and..? by PiSkyHi · · Score: 5, Funny

    You want mod points , I got em, I can help you out with th... oh crap, I've done it again haven't I.