Open Wireless networks
 

All over the place, went for a walk and out of interest scanned for networks on my N80, about 1 in 3 is open and can be accessed, very public spirited but a risk.

How much of a risk is it, mine has the wep enabled and only allows machines with known Mac addresses to connect so about as secure as I can make it.

What could someone do if yours is open, can they access your hd, I am thinking it would need to be shared and in a common 'MSHOME' type workgroup to make it easy but then I am no hacker, I know Wep can be cracked easily if you know what you are doing but why bother when they are open all over the shop !

Well for most home users I dont think its an issue and I dont think someone can just come and rip files off your machine anyway, certainly not your average joe.

It's a risk, but sometimes a little risk is a good thing.

i know of a few mates who run small business, and they "steal" the Internet connection from units or shops near by.

one of them wrote this on another site (he runs his own chinese takeaway)

awesome :lol1:

WEP is easily cracked. The FBI can do it in 3 minutes using publicly available tools and the method is not a secret. Your bog standard hacker (ie, the neighbours spotty teenage kid) will be able to copy this approach.

Also, MAC addresses can be spoofed. It is simple to sniff the traffic, see what MAC addresses are being used and change the network adapter settings to use a false MAC address.

The worst thing is you never know you've been hacked and what info "they" have on you.

If your router supports it go for WPA-PSK encryption instead and use a truly random and long key. The only real mechanism for breaking WPA encryption are long-winded dictionary attacks.

So would you need to first decrypt the WEP and then sniff out the MAC address bit ?

Don't you need quite a bit of data transfer to crack wep though? I know ages ago the general figure was 2 gig of data being intercepted/monitored was about enough to crack any wep key, although with weak ivs etc it can be done sooner?

For a home user wep and mac address is sufficient, wpa is better but can cause connection dropout issues on some hardware. At the end of the day if someone wants in on your network and they are that determined and skilled I'm sure they'll do it.

I think the MAC address is sent out unencrypted and it's the message payload that is encrypted. Can't guarantee that though.

I think it takes about 400Mb to decrypt WEP, but what the tools do that the FBI use is capture a packet and then repeatedly send the same packet to the router. The router then keeps responding with more info and it's this that is used to build up the 400Mb worth of data.

No way. Well I wouldn't risk it anyway. If I have hardware problems running WPA, I'd rather go out and buy a better router. As far as I know, no one has cracked WPA unless its been a dictionary attack or they have a supercomputer. So with WPA using a long key and ensuring it is random and you should be fine.

make a long key here:)

WPA-PSK Key Generator | Kurt's Website

if your router has the ability to use AES encryption then use it
to use the better WPA2 feature you may need to patch your machine with the below

Download details: Update for Windows XP (KB893357)

I can get free access from open networks at my in-laws house, my mothers house, my grandmas house, work, my own house, it is unbelievable how many people have no protection/security enabled at all.

Proby.

Yes, so some wierdo could be surfing all sorts of sick stuff and it would show up on your ISP list of sites visited.

So paedo's knowing this could surf wirelessley, harvest all the images they want and scuttle off leaving a trail against someones account.

The main thing about security is that someone has to know a) where something *secure* is and b) want to be able to hack into it.

So first they have to know it's there. Yep - one of my neighbours can see my wireless network - sometimes. Apart from that you'd have to walk up and down the road with a wireless phone or wotever to be able to find that it's there. *IF* you merely have MAC address filtering on, how many of that miniscule number of people that know your network is there will then want to try to hack it, and of that even smaller number, how many could succeed? The square root of b*gger all is the short answer in most cases.

Different for a corporate network but I'm quite happy with MAC address filtering at home.

Dave

Dave, your address is ?

In the GF's flat, i have a choice of about 7 open networks i can choose from :D. One of them gets download speeds of 8mb :D