Last week, I was chatting with Mediacom Regional VP Scott Westerman and a few others about the results of a wardriving survey of my community.
The cable TV company is getting ready to roll out wireless services, and has dispatched techs armed with laptops and mapping software to figure out where and how many wireless access points are running without protection.
That’s a big deal to Westerman, because unrestricted access points in homes and businesses can be used by spammers, virus distributors, and other ratfinks to steal Mediacom’s bandwidth from paying customers.
It’s a problem for the victims, too. Best case, you can end up barred from access to the Internet by your provider and/or block listing services.
Worst case, an attacker can steal everything on your hard drive, from tax records, to credit card numbers, to private communications, to critical passwords… then turn your computer into a zombie.
You don’t want to be running an unencrypted access point, either at home or your shop. But many folks do.
In my neighborhood alone, four out of five neighbors within range of my laptop are open for monkey business.
While the counts are still coming in, Mediacom’s results have been similar. NetStumbling techs have nearly filled-in the map of the Quad Cities.
It appears that, in addition to our strategic location for the transportation industry (at the intersection of Interstate 80 and the Mississippi River), we are perfectly situated to provide malware producers everything they need: zombies and bandwidth.
Go figure.
Is this wireless-retardation specific to Midwesterners, or is it less geo-specific?
7 comments
Comments feed for this article
August 30th, 2006 at 11:07 am
Mike
I live in Redmond, WA across the street from Microsoft and people are a little better over here. Maybe 7 out of 8 are secured. I wonder what other tech friendly cities are like.
August 30th, 2006 at 3:24 pm
BJ Gillette
Now we know why security geeks sleep with one eye open.
August 30th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
john
The situation is the same as you describe at my house here in Boise. Five out of six networks visible to my laptop are unsecured. Mine is the 1 of 6 that IS secured. Truly mindboggling.
September 1st, 2006 at 3:57 pm
sten
what’s wrong with sharing wifi? TOS issues aside, isn’t it the nice thing to do? Besides, WEP/WPA are easily cracked- I want real security, so I set up OpenVPN between my laptop and my access point.
December 30th, 2006 at 4:38 pm
Clement
> Is this wireless-retardation specific to Midwesterners, or is it less geo-specific?
Definitely geo-specific. I just moved from Michigan to California two months ago. In Michigan, there is *ZERO* secured access points in my neighborhood. So I thought I could just take my time ordering my Internet service when I moved to California.
But most AP’s in my new neighborhood has WEP. Some have WPA. One has VPN. One of them even has WPA2 already!
There’s no open AP’s in here! Not even a single one!
March 8th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
Robin
I live in Northern Virginia a bit of a tech savvy area. My neighborhood was mostly old folks although a very recent upsurge of younger families moving in happened recently. Needless to say, I could not find another wireless network protected or unprotected the last time I checked. My wireles network has WPA with a very long key code of random letters and numbers, much more than the minimum to prevent unauthorized access. I have problems typing in the key when I need to do so, so I should have a fairly secure wireless network. I only recently switched as I am a bit of a security freak and preferred wired networks for the home.
November 5th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Sweeper
One of the reasons why I DON’T encrypt my network is the extra CPU cycles required to decrypt the packages as they come in.
Now those cycles I use elsewhere so instead I opt for better checking of who uses and who is present on the network rather than encryption.
Even so, you still aren’t safe even with the WPA encryption, why?
Because you can still do a denial of use that may fake the sympthoms to make the user believe it is encryptions fault…
Those who wants to gain access to your network uses Linux distros with modded drivers and injects packages into your network, with WEP it was to generate weak IVs and reveal the password, with WPA it is to deny others the usage and keep you disconnected.