Anyone Just Watch The Planes Picking Up Wi-Fi Points on CNN?
 

CNN reporters flew low over LA in 2 small Cessna's with Wi-Fi scanning software in their laptops to see how many home and business access points they could find that were wide open (unencrypted).

They found over 4,500 of them. What was surprising 70% were wide open accessible with no encryption protection at all which means all the computers down below were fully accessible and they could have sent e-mails through those accounts or uploaded CP, terrorist stuff, etc. without the people down below having a clue.

Really proves people are so technology stupid and clueless.

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Here's the full story link at CNN Online:

http://www.tomshardware.com/column/20040430/

this is something I enjoy having CNN do.

im sure thats *all* they were scanning for too right?

i dont trust any of them.

my wifi network isnt secure....oh well.

I have access to 6 from my house, I suppose I could pretty much drive around with a laptop and always have access.

LOL hey Fletch they flew right over your area. :Graucho

I don't know why they just don't ship the consumer wifi hardware so you have to set up some sort of WEP by default.

from my condo i can access about 3-6 at any given time......all open

And did you explore any of them? :Graucho

I'm sure the majority of them were personal computes..but wonder how many came from wifi cafes.

They did a plane to plane video IM session too through two of the open WiFi networks below and it worked fine.

LOL they flew over downtown LA also and got some there as well from people's businesses and hi-rise offices.

In my oppinion this really just proves how badly wifi was developed. The idea is great, its just a pain to do it right.

Most hardware you buy finally is pre-set to encrypted, but the problem is that the hardware always has to have the same key set to it. Companies should finally force a change of the key when the software is installed, sadly noone does that.

90% of the time the password is "default" or the like. Its sad.

You can not expect normal people buying WiFi hardware to understand that they have to do something. They expect it to be plug-and-play, and it just isn't.

On top of all this shit, the software side is so bad, that I for example run unencrypted simply because I can not get WinXP to connect to my encrypted network, it just won't do it.

Not many people know that before cell phones went digital for several years they were all analog. With any 800 mhz radio scanner you could scan all the cell phone frequencies and listen in to everyone's phone calls.

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I'm not sure how newsworthy this is, I remember seeing one of the WiFi node list websites before, and putting in some major US cities just to see what came out (I'm in the UK).

For some of the places I tried in New York, there was at least a couple of open access points per block, which seemed pretty useful if you need internet access. Tons of 'Default' and 'Linksys' SSID's too..

And I often did.

that's scary stuff!! imagine having the FBI show up at your door for terrorist involvement when you aren't even close to being a criminal?? people with wi-fi connections need to smarten up and get secured!!! wtf??

i remember once on irc we had someone broadcasting through winamp some cell phone conversations. think it was one girl that gave out her number and people started calling her. i wish i still had the mp3 of it. they talked for like 20 mins about why people were calling constantly telling them they're being broadcasted on the net.

70 % .. it's not that hard to encrypt your access point

Hardly any of my neighbors wifi is secure - and they are all named the default manufacturer name of the access point. "linksys" "motorola" etc. :1orglaugh

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