Wireless security is important in the home for the same reasons why it is important in corporations. If you have an unsecured wireless network in your home, anyone in close proximity can spy on your online activities. Depending on how your home network is configured, someone could even gain full access to your computer’s hard drive over an unsecured wireless network.
Even if no one is around that wants to spy on you or perform some malicious action against you, your neighbors could sponge off of your Internet connection. This would not only deprive you of bandwidth that you are paying for, but if your neighbor conducted some illegal activity while online, it could be traced back to your network.
Right now you might be wondering what the odds are of any of these things ever happening. If you have an unsecured wireless connection, the odds of it being exploited are pretty good.
About four years ago, I was asked by one of the companies that I was writing for at the time to do an experiment to see how many wireless networks I could detect and how many of those networks were insecure. To perform the experiment, I loaded a copy of Net Stumbler onto my laptop and had my wife drive me around while I tried to detect wireless networks. During my experiment I managed to detect seven networks and none of them were secure.
Seven wireless networks certainly aren’t many, but there are several things to keep in mind. First, I live in the middle of nowhere in a rural part of South Carolina, not in a densely populated place like New York City. Second, I was using a stock Wi-Fi card without any type of external antenna. Third, I was attempting to detect wireless networks from a moving vehicle, using a Wi-Fi card that had a relatively short range. Fourth, this was four years ago.
If I detected that many wireless networks, four years ago, in the middle of nowhere, under conditions that would give me poor reception, can you imagine how many wireless networks are in use today? Wireless networks are everywhere, and the vast majority of them are insecure. In fact, as of December 2004, an estimated 60 to 70 percent of all wireless networks did not use any type of encryption. My point is that wireless networks are everywhere and the majority of them are insecure, and the bad guys know this.
Hackers routinely engage in a practice called war walking. War walking is similar to my little experiment. It’s basically a trip on foot, by car, by airplane, or what ever to try to locate wireless networks.
At first it might not seem like a big deal if a hacker knows that you have a wireless network. After all, most of your neighbors probably have wireless networks too. Besides, wireless networks have a relatively short range and it would be easy to spot someone sitting in front of your house with a laptop. The problem is that although your wireless access point may have a short range, it is possible to make a homemade antenna that can receive your network’s signal from many miles away. In fact, if a direct line of sight is available, it is possible to make a Wi-Fi antenna out of a Pringles can that can intercept a Wi-Fi signal from up to ten miles away. Hackers no longer need to sit in a car in front of your house to hack your wireless network.
3:28 PM
thanks man