Police in Queensland, Australia, are doing an electronic version or rattling the doorknobs – they’re war driving, looking for unsecured home WiFi connections.
Queensland Detective Superintendent Brian Hay said “All unsecured WiFi networks out there are open for exploitation by the crooks and the average mum and dad don’t understand the vulnerabilities.”
Intruders can use open connections to hack into other sites, plant malware on the web or steal information. Anyone tracing the malicious behavior would be led back to the victim with the open connection.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who has seen all the unsecured wireless connections in his neighborhood. In two places I’ve lived recently there have been three visible in each. One of them had a network name that looked like a 20-digit password and no password. Now that I think about it, I’ve never opened up my laptop without seeing at least one unsecured network.
Yea, it’s a little complicated, but you really should gut through it and put a password on your wireless router.
Story here.
Tom Kelchner