Lock Down Your Wi-Fi or the FBI Might Come Knocking

[nsane.forums]

A New York man learned the hard way that leaving your wireless router open to the general public can have some very negative consequences, and that the authorities tend to act first and ask questions second.

You might think it's no big deal to share your wireless network with your neighbors. But that altruism can bite you in the butt when a less scrupulous neighbor, or a random stranger connects to the wireless network and uses it for illegal activity. As far as the authorities are concerned, that illegal activity originates from your wireless router, so you are the primary suspect.

Lock down the bits and bytes on your Wi-Fi network or it might be used for illegal activity.So, what happened? Well, this guy left his home Wi-Fi network unprotected, and a slimy neighbor piggy-backed on his "free" wireless network to access thousands of child pornography images. He's not the first to fall victim to this scenario, and, unfortunately, he won't be the last.

It is important that you lock your wireless network down. WEP (wired equivalent privacy) encryption has as many holes as Swiss cheese, and can be easily cracked in a matter of seconds, but even turning on such weak protection is better than nothing. If you scan any given neighborhood for wireless networks, you will find at least one that has no encryption turned on, and that low-hanging fruit is the network that will draw attention rather than a network that requires hacking to connect to.

But, to provide better security you should use WPA or WPA-2 encryption. With most home and SOHO (small office / home office) wireless routers, it is as simple as logging in to the Admin console, enabling the encryption, and setting a password. However, as this recent incident demonstrates, "simple" is relative, and enabling wireless encryption is easier said than done for many users.

The real answer, though, lies with the wireless router vendors. Unfortunately, convenience and simplicity trump security. Wi-Fi routers are designed to just work right out of the box. They live up to the claims in most cases--as long as your only concern is being able to connect to the wireless network and start surfing the Internet. But, if you also want your wireless network to be secure, they don't work so well out of the box after all.

Users who are not tech savvy, and want the convenience of a wireless router that "just works" are not likely to invest the time and effort to learn about the inner-workings of the router, or to understand and enable the security features. Wireless routers should be designed with encryption enabled by default, and part of the initial configuration should involve stepping the user through the process of establishing a unique SSID, and setting a secure password.

For now, though, that ball is in your court. Do yourself a favor and take the 15 minutes to figure out how to log into the admin console for your Wi-Fi router and turn on encryption to prevent unauthorized piggy-backing. If you don't, the next knock on your door might be the FBI--and they might not be there for pleasant chit-chat.

View: Original Article

[Hottwire]

It amazes me still to read things like this, its not hard now a days to sort it out.

Myself personally has a hard to get into Wi-Fi

For a start if you get the WPA2 Key that is 14 digits long in Upper/Lowercase with numbers as well then you have to assign yourself a static IP as the router doesn't act as a DHCP server and then ontop of that your MAC address has to be verified in the router table, so it requires well someone on the network already to authenticate you :P this is my setup some people might call it a tad extreme but meh I'd rather this than someone piggy back off it and download illegal stuff such as what happened above, if anyone is going to do something illegal on my network it will be me (not that i would or anything :ph34r:)

[Nemesis]

if they wanna slap the wrist of the guy that was being computer ignorant that' s fine and all... but i wanna know what happened to the real creep... :unsure:

[mara-]

Thing with MAC table and hiding SSID is just marketing c*ap.

Cheers ;)

[myidisbb]

if they wanna slap the wrist of the guy that was being computer ignorant that' s fine and all... but i wanna know what happened to the real creep... :unsure:

the stupid cop went back and checked his log on his ip addresses from the p2p. then was able to figure out a person at a business ip address lived next to the victim. he was arrested and plead not guilty. dumb shit should gotten rid of everything after the cops knock next door.

[#return 1337]

I constantly break into my neighbor's WEP encrypted routers and leave them nice presents.

Just because it's encrypted, doesn't mean you can't break it.

You can break WPA/WPA2, it just takes a lot longer and not many people use it.

[mara-]

Breaking WPA/WPA2 depends on password, since breaking it is based on brute force, using dictionary. So, breaking WPA/WPA2 in some situations is not possible.

Cheers ;)