UPDATED: A man arrested for wireless piggybacking

Ok, I’ll admit it, I’m totally in love with my new laptop. I know it’s not really that fancy (no BlueTooth, etc), but it’s been extremely liberating to take my work/play on the road. Nev, for instance, is taken with his tablet PC, but I’m pretty good with the keys and I’m against the smudge marks on the display =)

Shortly after getting the laptop, I installed a Wireless-B (cheaper, older) router in my place, thus enabling myself to roam freely. Of course, I threw a security key on the connection, however …

… apparently, there are people in town who don’t know how or don’t want to secure their routers. That top unsecured connection was snached up by my laptop while I was driving through town. I did not realize how many people actually live in wi-fi enabled households! It was a complete shocker to see how many people ran unsecured wi-fi!

So I surfed the net for a little bit while being parked next to a few houses, and bookmarked a few addresses with strongest signals on my Google Earth globe for future reference.

Then I did the first thing any IT person would do when (s)he sees an unsecured wi-fi network named linksys or netgear: open browser, punch in 192.168.1.1. When the login prompt came up, I punched in admin for login and password (or blank) for password.

Voila …

… I’m inside their router. I can do whatever the hell I want now, like knock out their Internet alltogether (by changing one digit in the DNS), or create a secured connection for one’s own hypothetical dirty deeds. Of course, their cable hookup would still work, and they could hook their computer up by bypassing the router and going straight to the cable modem. However, if it’s some computer-illiterate Joe Blow’s apartment, is he really going to find that router setup CD, reset the router by holding reset button for 5 seconds, and re-run setup? Yeah, right.

So perhaps he gets a flyer the next day saying something like, “Internet stopped working? A new superscary deadly credit card-stealing virus is going around!” and advertising a quick $29.99 fix … Too sleazy for your taste? It could happen …

The lesson here is this – always secure your wi-fi connection. It’s not that much more complicated to create a meaningful 10-digit key, though you must use hexadecimal base (numbers 0-9, letters A-F). The router wants to assign a complicated key, like A7C0BF96D4, but you can always make up your own by visiting Scrabble Dictionary and punching in ABCDEF into their word builder. Good key components abound – ACE, BAD, BADE, BEAD, BEEF, CAFE, DEB, DEAF, FAD, FADE, FACE … Why not secure your network with a cool, easy-to-remember and give-out-to-friends key like BADACEDEAD, or DECAFFCAFE?