ok peeps i live in england, i decided yesterday to go out in the car with my wireless laptop and see how many people have not locked there wireless networks you would not believe how many i found within 15 minutes of leaving my house . within a 1 mile radius i found over 50 wireless connections only 12 of them were locked The worst part is , the people who have the wireless connections have actually named them, with great names like : ohhsofast jimswireless offshoregeordie all im thinking is if they can name them why cant they lock them up securely with the wep key. how many of you have wireless in your homes and how many off you have them locked now if i could pinpoint the houses exactly i would probs knock on there door and say HEY i can sit outside your house and use your internet connection without you knowing, but then you have to think about the implacations of doing that , some people could phone the cops and say someone has been using my internet connection without my knowledge, and ive just checked it is against the law, do you think i could contact these people and offer them a service to make there wireless connections safe . any ideas welcome
my network is secured but there is a few i can pickup from within my house if i need some extra bandwidth
You shouldn't use WEP keys anyway, use WPA if possible... http://www.shawnhogan.com/2006/08/how-to-crack-128-bit-wireless-networks.html
For WPA, certain shorter or dictionary-based keys are highly crackable because an attacker can monitor a short transaction or force that transaction to occur and then perform the crack
Most wireless networks are pretty easy to crack with the right knowledge. I had a neighbor with an unsecured wireless network plus they never changed the admin password so we did that for him, without telling them of course. We would change things on his network like the name on a weekly basis for about a year until he called someone to secure it - this was after we changed the network to a different name and secure it with wep. Good times . You'd be amazed at how many wireless networks don't change their default passwords for the administration.
Y there is no excuse to not have the royters secured. Most are secured as default people must be going out of there way to shut it off ..lol
Around half of the networks around here are open. Wep is enough to stop a basic newbie but you really need WMA and you should still have a strong password.
Go to any large train station, sit, open you laptop and search for wireless networks; you cannot imagine how many unsecured connections you can find in any public places like airports, stations, ...