Using some one elses wireless network..

adamknox

adamknox

adamknox

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11 Jun 2009
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Bridgwater, Somerset, UK
A few months back i was around a friends when there internet went suddenly slow. I checked and it said 4 people were connected to her wireless modem (when she was the only one in her house online) I offerd to add network WEP key to her wireless broadband. She has said since that her internet has NEVER slowed! Obviously the neighbour were connecting to it.

Now being honest... have any of you ever connected to a wireless network you didnt own? ;) Tbh it ****es me off when people do it. People who dont know much about computers are paying for Internet and loseing it to some one who is too cheap to pay the 13.99 a month.. (sky, AOL etc)

On the other hand is it the person's fault who owns the wireless internet) for not making sure they are secure!.. Just wonderd what your views on it was :P

P.s Something that made me laugh. While my friend and I were working out which neighbour (theres that word again ><) was stealing internet, we noticed a girl over thew road sat on her doorstep on her laptop. About 5 mins after i added the WEP the girl looked anoyed and shut off her laptop and went in lol! Gutted ;)
 
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groen said:
Even if you secure your wireless i can crack it in less than 5 mins.

neighbour is the correct spelling btw.
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Lmao ty ;) Ill go and change it now. tut tut you hacker you.

I personaly use WPA but my friends router only supported WEP :(
 
Personally my morality runs as follows:

No encryption - fair game, there is plenty of information in the mainstream press about being secure now and new routers are (mostly) supplied secured

Encryption - a no-no, might be fun to crack a friends key but that's about the limit of it.
 
i used to use a neighbours wireless a few years back if my own internet was to go down for some reason (back then i happened quite a bit)

but now all the wireless signals i pick up are secured (plus my internet is pretty rock solid now anyways)
 
I noticed my router's WLAN light flashing like crazy yesterday. There was no one else at home, so I quickly logged into the router config to investigate. Turned out someone had managed to hack into my network:(. I swiftly banned his mac address and changed my WPA key.:cool:
 
groen said:
Even if you secure your wireless i can crack it in less than 5 mins.

neighbour is the correct spelling btw.

if you must use wireless, use WPA rather than WEP. but both are easily crackable.
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Wep and wpa are easy to crack.

but wpa2 is not and tell you what else is hard, the segam sky routers.

Edit

To add insult to them, change the SSID to GET YOUR OWN INTERNET :D
 
groen said:
Even if you secure your wireless i can crack it in less than 5 mins.

neighbour is the correct spelling btw.

if you must use wireless, use WPA rather than WEP. but both are easily crackable.
Click to expand...

I had some repeat offender on mine could only be bothered to set up WEP since then I just turned on access control.
Is access control crackable ? I use that on mine only allow the 2 mac address's of the computers that connect via wireless in the house.
There should be a number you can ring and find out which address is the offender or report the mac address / IP and get these people done.
 
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C64 said:
Is access control crackable ? I use that on mine only allow the 2 mac address's of the computers that connect via wireless in the house.
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Yes, all they have to do is sniff one of the MAC addresses and spoof it. Use WPA2, or failing that WPA-AES.
 
dave-lew99 said:
Personally my morality runs as follows:

No encryption - fair game, there is plenty of information in the mainstream press about being secure now and new routers are (mostly) supplied secured

Encryption - a no-no, might be fun to crack a friends key but that's about the limit of it.
Click to expand...

Yup, that's my stance on it also.

We goto America every 18 months or so and Stop in the same Villa. Luckily for us we have had access to an unsecured wireless network in the Villa next door on our last 4 visits The signal has been strong enough for web browsing(trust me getting football news over there is a PIA) and Skype. If you leave your network open then you really are asking for people to take advantage of it.
 
I found this interesting. I'm pretty indifferent about it, I never really use Wi-fi on the go as I can never find any spots but if there were any I probably would. It'd be nice if Wi-fi was available in parks etc. That said if it were my own connection that people were stealing I wouldn't be best pleased! Currently I'm using WPA but I'd like to just have it unencrypted and then add machines manually via MAC, as I'm sure it'd speed it up somewhat.
 
Jesus it looks like to me more people are just bragging about being able to hack into somebody's wireless. What's the chance that you have actually have someone smart enough to be able to do that within range of your router?
 
WPA2-AES is indeed crackable, even with the full length hexadecimal key. Tbh I really should change it every few months but I'm lazy like that and there are other, softer routers near me so meh :)

There are commercial password recovery tools that use the gpu to bruteforce in but I haven't checked on those for about a year. Even than you needed ~25K worth of workstation gpus (relatively, not a lot) to do a 7-8 character key in a reasonable time but every successive character is a time multiplier.

In short, use a full length key and change every few months and every thing's fine. Don't use wep. Do remember that idiot-proofing technology and security doesn't really happen :P
 
By your logic we only need to change the WPA key when we see someone sat outside with a few dozen GPUs....

16 Days, 5 hours, 10 minutes: 99% complete
......
Error: Target Key Changed!

0 Days, 0 Hours, 0 minutes: 0% complete


FUUUUUUUU!


:p
 
groen said:
Even if you secure your wireless i can crack it in less than 5 mins.

neighbour is the correct spelling btw.

if you must use wireless, use WPA rather than WEP. but both are easily crackable.
Click to expand...

That's why I would like a router with wi-fi on/off button on the device. Yes I could log on and disable wi-fi, but as PC isn't on all the time, a button on the device is the easiest option.

Only time I've accessed a non-secure network was when my internet went down. To check if it was something with the exchange or just my ISP. But didn't bother using connection apart from loading up a single webpage to check.

When I went to a friends parents house, their router had wireless accidently enabled with no password (a Thomson router with button on the front to turn on/off wi-fi). Had about three entries of other computers connecting to it, so got that setup correctly then disabled wireless.
 
There is actually a vulnerability with the WPA relating to the TKIP, initially it only allowed reading of small packets but was successfully used to crack the wan last year in 1-2minutes.

Either use WPA-AES or WPA2-AES. TKIP isn't much better than WEP :(.
 
I am less concerned about someone using my internet connection as I am about them being able to get to my hard drives and data. Assuming someone can break my WEP / WPA key how do I best secure the data on my shared folders and network drives?
 
if you are running windows there is not much you can do. If someone has the knowledge to crack your wpa/wep then they will most likely have the knowledge to access all the computers on the network as well. Wireless is like someone coming over to your house with a network cable and plugging it directly into the network.But thankfully there are not many people who have the knowledge. But it is getting easier and easier. If you are paranoid, cover up your webcams with tape when you are not using them, keep a nix based fileserver. *shrug*
 
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