Things Are Looking Up

[crokett]

One of my in-laws' neighbors doesn't know enough to secure their wireless connection. I don't have to go out to the coffee shop any more.

[Mr__Bill]

Before you leave be sure to leave a nice Christmas card on their printer. Just sign it Santa. Should freak them out.


Bill

[Knottscott]

Good for you!

[Ed62]

I guess I'm lucky I don't have wireless. Everyone around here would be using it.

Ed

[herb fellows]

Not to poke a hole in your baloon, bu that is a two way street, right? Either they are really dumb or they are really smart and are stealing your information every time you use their connection.
Even if they aren't, I believe it's posssible for anyone else using the connection to glom your info also.

[LinuxRandal]

Even with a secured wireless network connection, its been shown that it can be broken fairly easily in four minutes (can be done in less though). So with something like a packet sniffer, etc. they can still get enough to play back to your pc.

On the other side, my brother was setting up my brother in laws wireless and he couldn't understand why it wasn't working. He was in the router of a neighbors setup, securing it instead. (a police officer neighborhood)
The next week, all four detectable were secured.

[JSUPreston]

I was visiting BIL over Thanksgiving. His WAP wasn't secured. Neither was any of the other 3 or 4 that I could get to. They were all installed by BellSouth and were apparently all in one wireless router/dsl modems. DAMHIKT!

If I were an evil person, I could have caused all sorts of damage, and probably would have never gotten caught. It is scary that even BS will put these things out like that. At least set it up with basic authentication.

[dbhost]

Which is yet another reason you should set up a firewall, and intrusion detection on your PC, not just your network...

[LinuxRandal]

A honeypot can be fun too.

[crokett]

I know the risks in using an unknown connection. I view it as no different than using the connection at a coffee shop. So no personal or otherwise banking or other sensitive data. If somebody wants my BT3Central password, well then just watch for some strange posts from my account in the next few days. Plus my laptop is pretty well firewalled. More than most. I have my company's normal security then extra on top of that because I have confidential customer data on it.

[smorris]

You might want to check your local laws, they arrest people for that down here if they catch them, and they do. It's stealing bandwidth. Yea, I've heard all the arguments that it not stealing, I happen to think it is and as a bonus I get paid to enforce that position.

[shoottx]

You might want to check your local laws, they arrest people for that down here if they catch them, and they do. It's stealing bandwidth. Yea, I've heard all the arguments that it not stealing, I happen to think it is and as a bonus I get paid to enforce that position.

+1

Not to be a stick in the mud, but my initial reaction since you are a bit of a computer wizard, is to go tell the neighbors about the risk they are taking, and then help them correct the problem.

Going to the coffee shop isn't all that bad!