My Second Sorta Kinda WarDrive
So last night I decided to try it again, except I was going to take another route home to see if I could find any open networks on my secondary route. The first route I took the night before last was mostly freeway so I was surprised to even find 10. This time I took the surface streets and happened upon 26 WiFi networks. Once again there were only a few that had any encryption at all. There were actually 5 that the SSID was "default".
From the way they were spaced out along my route I could have surfed the internet the entire way home. Because I live/work in a mostly residential area, most if not all of these open networks were home based personal networks. I just can't believe how many people buy these things and don't have a clue how to set them up. Just crazy!
Comments
Some people may have left their networks open on purpose, so others could freely use the net :) Anarchy in the USA!
Posted by: Wonko | November 26, 2003 11:02 AM
I've considered setting up a free access point, but not before I do some routing to keep evil-doers off my LAN. I'd also want some kind of throttling functionality so people can't bogart all my bandwidth.
But I imagine most of those networks were unintentionally open. Maybe someday manufacturers will turn security ON by default. Of course, in the meantime, it's kind of a nice source of occassional free bandwidth for those of us who are technically-inclined. ;-)
Posted by: justis | November 26, 2003 11:21 AM
Exactly, it's the people that are set to "default" that trip me out. I ran my netork open for a while. Though, when it was open the SSID was "Surfers Welcome". I didn't get anybody connecting so I brought it down and went full incrytion. This also has to do with the fact that the guy that just moved next door to me is a sys-admin and I don't need him testing out exploits on me.
Posted by: obigabu | November 26, 2003 11:46 AM
Better to have a neighbor testing exploits on you than a cracker with malicious intent, no? Besides, people can still try exploits on you if you don't have the wifi open... in fact, I'd guess that more people try to exploit your network from your internet pipe than your local wifi network.
Posted by: kasei | November 26, 2003 12:28 PM
I think kasei is exactly right. I think that there are definately more exploit attempts on the network from the hard line that the WiFi.
Posted by: Obigabu | November 27, 2003 02:24 AM