Posted on 01/07/2008 10:46:22 AM PST by SubGeniusX
Network security firm Sophos recently published a study on what it terms WiFi "piggybacking," or logging on to someone's open 802.11b/g/n network without their knowledge or permission. According to the company's study, which was carried out on behalf of The Times, 54 percent of the respondents have gone WiFi freeloading, or as Sophos put it, "admitted breaking the law [in the UK]."
Amazingly, accessing an unsecured, wide-open WiFi network without permission is illegal in some places, and not just in the UK. An Illinois man was arrested and fined $250 in 2006 for using an open network without permission, while a Michigan man who parked his car in front of a café and snarfed its free WiFi was charged this past May with "Fraudulent access to computers, computer systems, and computer networks." On top of that, it's common to read stories about WiFi "stealing" in the mainstream media.
It's time to put an end to this silliness. Using an open WiFi network is no more "stealing" than is listening to the radio or watching TV using the old rabbit ears. If the WiFi waves come to you and can be accessed without hacking, there should be no question that such access is legal and morally OK. If your neighbor runs his sprinkler and accidentally waters your yard, do you owe him money? Have you done something wrong? Have you ripped off the water company? Of course not. So why is it that when it comes to WiFi, people start talking about theft?
The issue is going to come to a head soon because more and more consumer electronics devices are WiFi-enabled, and many of them, including Apple's iPhone and most Skype phones we've used, come ready out of the box to auto-connect to open WiFi networks. Furthermore, as laptop sales continue to grow even beyond desktops, the use of open WiFi is only going to grow along with it.
Steal this WiFi connection!
When you steal something, there's typically a victim. With WiFi, Sophos thinks the ISPs are the victims. "Stealing WiFi Internet access may feel like a victimless crime, but it deprives ISPs of revenue," according to Sophos' senior technology consultant Graham Cluley. Furthermore, "if you've hopped onto your next door neighbors' wireless broadband connection to illegally download movies and music from the 'Net, chances are that you are also slowing down their Internet access and impacting on their download limit." In Sophos' view, then, both ISPs and everyday subscribers can be victims.
In one fell swoop, "stealing WiFi" gets mentioned in the same breath as "illegally" downloading movies and music. The fact is, people join open WiFis for all manner of reasons: to check e-mail, surf the web, look up directions to some place, etc. Those don't sound like nefarious activities, however, and certainly not activities which are likely to get someone in trouble. Of course if you run an open WAP (wireless access point) and it is heavily used for just e-mail, you could still hit your bandwidth cap (if you even have one), but that has to happen only once for that user to figure out what's up, and fix the problem. And let's be honest: it is their problem. No one forced that user to install a WAP or to leave it wide open. We'll get back to this in a minute.
The argument that using open WiFi networks deprives ISPs of significant revenue is also a red herring. Take the case of public WiFi hotspots: official hotspots aren't that difficult to find in major cities—every public library in Chicago has open WiFi, for instance. Are the public libraries and the countless other free hotspot providers helping defraud ISPs? No, they're not. There's no law that using the Internet requires payment of a fee to an ISP, and the myriad public hotspots prove this.
Really, there's only one time when you could argue that an ISP is being gypped, and that's when someone is repeatedly using his neighbor's open WiFi in lieu of paying for his own service. Is this really wrong? Let's consider some parallel examples. If the man in question were given a key and told that he could enter his neighbor's house whenever he wanted to use a PC to access the Internet, would this be wrong? Of course not. They key here (pun intended) is the "permission" given by the owner of the home. Our leeching friend would clearly be in the wrong if he were breaking into the house, of course, because he would be sidestepping something clearly set up to keep him out. If he has permission, I suppose one could argue that it's still not right, but you won't find a court that will punish such a person, nor will you find too many people thrilled at the idea that someone else can tell them who they can and can't allow into their homes for what purposes.
Some people leave their wireless access points wide open deliberately. A friend of mine and recent seminary graduate lived in a campus-owned apartment building. In addition to being a man of the cloth, Peter is a longtime Linux user and open-source advocate. While living here in Chicago, he got his DSL from Speakeasy and shared the connection with others in his building... and anyone else who needed a quick Internet fix (Speakeasy even encouraged this). He even positioned his router so that anyone in the church across the street could pick up a signal. Obviously, not everyone is like Peter. But despite easy-to-read instructions and a plethora of warnings about the need to secure your WAP, some people just can't be bothered to enable the most basic security settings.
To the person with a laptop and a sudden need to check e-mail or surf the web, it's not possible to tell who is leaving their access points open deliberately and who just plain doesn't care. The access point is there and the virtual doors are unlocked, so why not take advantage of it if you're in need?
A couple of caveats: be familiar with the law of the land. As the examples at the beginning of this story show, it's illegal to access a WAP without permission—even if it's wide open—in some places. Also, you should never use an open point for anything illegal or even unneighborly. Don't log onto the first "linksys" WAP you see and fire up a torrent for your favorite, just-released Linux distro.
And as always, don't leave your own 802.11b/g/n router wide open unless you're comfortable with random surfers using your 'Net access for their own purposes.
Open WiFi is clearly here to stay.
Impressive, but I can’t imagine that anyone would refer to that scenario as “war driving”.
My sons were born in 1980, 1983 and 1987. I was teaching embedded systems at Southwestern College from 1980 to 1983. Principally 6800 and 8085 microprocessor based systems. The bottom end IBM PC was $1200 with a 35W power supply, floppy disk and a stunning 640K of memory. My first decent computer was a Heath H-8 in 1980. It ran HDOS, CP/M and the UCSD Pascal operating system. I had a couple ham buddies who built IMSAI 8080 S100 systems. They were pretty primitive.
The oldest computers I used at work were 21-bit HP2100 minicomputers. They were used as satellite navigation computers on tuna boats. I had to key in the bootstrap loader using the 21 switches (7 groups of 3 switches for octal input). The bootstrap routine was about 50 lines (words). Once started, the bootstrap loader operated a cassette drive in the pilot house. That loaded the secondary loader, then it was ready to read the software in via the cassette. That machine had core memory. It was a big improvement when Motorola came out with the next generation using an 8080 microprocessor. I worked on those old sat nav computers from 1977 to 1980 when I moved to the phone company. It was the advent of microprocessors in the digital radios and satellite navigation computers that nudged me in the direction of making computer science a profession in 1980.
You seem to know alot about the electromagnetic spectrum and wireless communications. I’d like to ask you an unrelated question.
I’ve read that there is a new hobby called amateur television. People are transmitting television signals on very specific frequencies that are allocated by the FCC specifically for amateurs. I don’t remember what frequencies are allocated for this but I think it is in the UHF range. Supposedly, anyone with a cable ready TV and a cable box can pick these signals up.
My question is, what the heck does a cable ready TV have to do with receiving these airwave signals? Doesn’t cable TV receive signals over a wire only? THere’s no signal on the airwaves, is there? What are they talking about and why does it require a cable ready TV to pick up these amateur signals?
Oh, as for your discussion about how they catch people stealing cable TV, couldn’t someone rig up a simple faraday cage around their cable box to render the cable box “invisible” to their cable box detectors?
What?
No one needs a license to receive (except in the UK, where it is a licence, not a license).
You need a license, in some instances, to TRANSMIT, such as on Ham Radio bands and any frequency that is designated as assigned by the FCC to some non-public purpose and exceeds certain power limits
It's a screwy term. There's a Wikepedia page that describes the origin of the term here.
I'm still working on getting my 7 dBi 2.4 GHz vertical mounted on the highest point of my roof for a good 360 view. I'm interested in evaluating AODV and OLSR mesh networking with some of my ham buddies in the north end of Pocatello. It's almost OBE (overcome by events) as the Bridge Maxx people just installed WiMax towers in the north and south areas of Pocatello. Cheap, high bandwidth wireless is available now. There's not much point in establishing mesh networks to provide coverage with conventional 802.11b.
I wonder if the "built-in" i.e. integral QAM tuners are noisy like that.
Most highway vehicles have the advantage of being able to move two-dimensionally, unlike a train on tracks, so a directional handheld antenna is a real advantage.
I have found that with small dipole antennas mounted remotely, that so much signal is attenuated in the length of cable that the advantage of gain is almost lost, except with a real high gain design or in conjunction with an amp.
I am installing two yagis to bridge the gap between my house and my mother’s, but not being a radio amateur, much of this is trial and error.
It's up to me to decide whether I want to be generous, or not. My money is paying for the service. So my network has a passkey, which is given only to members of my household and a select few friends.
A "cable ready" TV has a fairly versatile tuner that covers a variety of channel allocation schemes. The channel assignments differ for "over the air" vs "cable" channels. There are 2 or 3 different channel schemes for cable as well. What is important is that the "cable ready" tuner when turned to CATV ch 57 is dead on 421.25 MHz, ch 60 is dead on 439.25 MHz. CATV channels 57 - 60 fall in the 70 cm ham band. Check your local area for fast scan ATV on 70 cm. You might be able to pick up some transmissions with stuff you have around the house. Passive reception doesn't require a license. If it really strikes your fancy, it is easy enough to study for the license. It's all written tests now. No more Morse code proficiency.
A good Faraday cage is a significant task. You'll have to encase the converter box AND the TV. The security department at my company was making an office area in a Faraday cage to process TS data. It took a couple of weeks to build the cage and about 4 days to certify it using standardized test receivers outside and transmitters inside. Remember you are dealing with high frequencies with very short wave lengths. It's not a trivial task.
Very true. Though WEP is ineffective from a security standpoint, it at least provides a hurdle that someone has to deliberately jump through to prove malicious intent on the part of the unauthorized user accessing the network.
My question is, what the heck does a cable ready TV have to do with receiving these airwave signals? Doesn’t cable TV receive signals over a wire only? THere’s no signal on the airwaves, is there? What are they talking about and why does it require a cable ready TV to pick up these amateur signals?
Amateur fast-scan television is usually transmitted on any of 4 channels between 420 MHz to 445 MHz. TVs that only receive broadcast TV won't pick up those channels as they are located between the channels allocated for over the air channels 13 and 14. "Cable-ready" TVs on the other hand do receive these frequencies. They are cable channels 57 to 60. Although cable-ready TVs are meant to be connected to a wired system, if you connect an antenna instead and there is a nearby amateur TV station, then you can watch it over the air on one of those 4 cable channels.
YOU made your character an issue by bringing it into the discussion. I've tried to argue only the facts. And the fact is that simply connecting to a network is not "packet sniffing."
If you want to do that in a wireless fashion, something like netstumbler is a more useful tool.
You mean I can't packet sniff with Internet Explorer? Then I guess simply connecting to someone's AP and browsing the net isn't really packet sniffing then is it?
It’s ISPs that really have an interest in creating this new ‘crime’ and then cracking down on it.
And that, my FRiend, is the FReeper Answer of the Day.
P.S. - I leave my router WIDE OPEN :) (and there are good reasons for this!)
The transmitter hunt was conducted by having all participants gather at the starting point. Odometer readings were recorded. At 5 PM the transmitter is switched on. When the participant finds the transmitter, the time is recorded and mileage is recorded. The sum of miles and minutes is your score. Low score wins. Using the DoppleScAnt, you can get to the transmitter as rapidly as driving conditions permit. Do a Google search for DoppleScAnt to see PDF drawing of the designs.
If you want to get better results on your 2.4 GHz bridge, I recommend using an Ethernet Bridge with Power Over Ethernet to put the transmitter as close to the antenna as possible. Minimize the coax losses with very short runs or select LMR400 with type-N connectors to reduce the losses. I purchase most of my 2.4 GHz "toys" from Hyperlink Technologies. If you have a small order, they have an e-Bay shop. They sell 2.4 GHz inline, pole mounted amplifiers. You'll need to make sure the amplifier is just overcoming the coax loss so your effective radiated power doesn't exceed FCC limits. The amps are available in bi-directional models. Remember than an amplifier amplifies signal and noise. You're ahead to get the Ethernet converter closer to the antenna in preference to a long coax run.
Look for a book called "WiFi Toys" at the bookstore. There are some fun projects in there.
Anyway, here's this guy, who is really serious about security, to the point that he's written his own cryptographic algorithms that have withstood peer review, and he responds to a question about how he secures his own network, by saying that he doesn't do anything. No WPA, no WEP, no nothing. Claims having an open network is being a good netzien. I found it interesting. Personally, I suspect strongly that with all the known hacks against the various protocols "securing" wireless networks, that he knows it is essentially useless, and prefers to just forgo the hassle, and instead have plausible deniability if someone claims he does something naughty with his network.
That is one of the things I was looking at. They also have the USB antennas with the chipset right in the antenna, so no cable run at all outboard of the transmitter. The USB cable can be quite long and can even have a sort of repeater midway. Thanks for your help.
Can you prove YOU did not download the porn?
Or music, or DVDs, etc
Sure: ‘Here’s my hard drives...take a look see, it wasn’t me.”
There are tools that will do the packet sniffing and display using Internet Explorer if that lights your fire. If you happen to connect to the management interface of the AP using HTTP on ports 80, 8080 or 8081, you can see quite a bit in the device logs. An AP left "open" is usually the consequence of an inexperienced owner who has made no attempt to lock it down. There's plenty of opportunity for mischief.
Tell it to the judge.
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