Free WIFI, anyone?

I don’t know how many of you have wireless networks, or how many of you ever use networks that are not your own, but this ought to give you pause.

Basically, this guy was using someone else’s unsecured wireless network and was arrested. Now, I don’t know what he was doing on the network, which may be a contributing factor to his arrest. In my opinion, if someone decides to keep their network wide open (as was the case) they shouldn’t expect other people not to use it. If this had been an encrypted network, and the offender broke in, that would be a problem. But leaving your network wide open means that you are publishing it for other people to use.So that brings us to the other side of the equation. Those who are running wireless networks. While it is true that really good hackers can stil get by any encryption you have in a matter of minutes, using password protection (with quality passwords) and encryption, and making your network not broadcast it’s presence are simple steps to take to protect your network.

There are a variety of reasons to do this, as well as to lock down all computers you have that are accessible from this network. For example, I was staying at a hotel that had free WIFI one time, and one of my coworkers decided that he was going to see how protected the computers on the network were. Suffice it to say that he had unlimited access to the hard drives of the two Point of Sale computers without even having to hack anything.The other problem with an unprotected network is just what people can do with it. For example, let’s say some person in your town is intent on either viewing or distributing child pornography. Is he going to do this from a network that can be traced back to him? No. He’s going to drive around town until he finds an open wireless network and upload his stuff from there. If this happens to be your network, the IP address can be traced to you and you could have a hard time explaining to the FBI how that stuff got there from your address. At the very least, they would probably confiscate all your computers until they are satisfied that there never was any of that content on them. That makes for a very bad day.Basically, be responsible. Make sure that your network is protected from casual hackers.