[CWN-Summit] BBC Story: Wireless hijacking under scrutiny

[Harold Feld]

Indeed, I had a friend email me with a question 
the other day.  He lives in San Francisco and asked:

"An open wireless network just popped up on my 
laptop in my apartment. How can I tell if it is 
meant to be open or if someone just left it open by accident?"

My advice was to look at the name of the 
network.  If it had a name, and was open, you 
could reasonably assume that the person left it 
open deliberately.  After all, if they knew 
enough to change the default for the name, then 
they can be presumed to know enough to enable 
WEP.  OTOH, if the name is "Lynksis" or some 
other default name, odds are good the person just left it opne by accident."

This is not great reasoning, but it was the best I could offer.

Worse, I occasionally have the problem, when 
sitting in my back yard, of having my neighbor's 
wireless signal be stronger than my own.  Since 
one of my neighbors (I don't know which) has an 
open network blasting at full power with no 
defaults changed, my Powerbook will join my 
neighbor's network by default if his/her signal is stronger.

Harold


At 07:33 AM 7/28/2005, you wrote:
>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4721723.stm
>
>A recent court case, which saw a West London man fined
>£500 and sentenced to 12 months' conditional discharge
>for hijacking a wireless broadband connection, has
>repercussions for almost every user of wi-fi networks
>_______________________________________________
>CWN-Summit mailing list
>CWN-Summit at lists.cuwireless.net
>http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/cwn-summit