Posters Name: Kagato
Posters Email: kagato@mwgl.org
Subject: 802.11b Wireless Networks - What You Should Know
News:
Apparently a couple of guys from Extreme Tech decided to see how many secure/unsecure wireless they could tap into as they drove around New York, New Jersey, Boston, and Silicon Valley with a high gain antenna. Using NetStumbler and Linux AirSnort to help them search, they came across over 800 networks and less than 40% had any sort of security. Here's a snip from their adventure:
We picked one network at random, associated with the access point, and immediately received an IP address from that network's DHCP server. Since the SSID was set to the manufacturer's default, we decided to play a hunch. We pointed our web browser at the IP address of the router, and discovered that whoever installed the wireless router hadn't even changed the default password. Not only were we into their network, we could have changed the router configuration. We were able to surf the web using their Internet connection. And if we had really put a little additional effort into it, we could have discovered additional information about their internal network. However, we were more interested to see how many wireless networks we could discover, not how deeply we could get into them. We discovered that we could identify wireless networks inside buildings at least 6 blocks away.As with any technology, there are always the morons that don't RTFM. I know similar happenings with those who have Cable/DSL routers and don't update the default password like it says right in the manual.