02.27.06
Basic Security Skills
I posted an extensive message in my technical website (Professor Geek) regarding an experience one of my students reported to me regarding his wireless router. In essence, he caught someone stealing his connection by sitting outside his house in a car surfing the Internet on a laptop while connected to his Internet connection via his wireless router (which was not secured). If they are going to sell these things to the general public at Wal-Mart, we need to teach people how to simply and quickly take some minimal security precautions.
I have given my networking students a project to do wherein they wardrive, an activity that involves detecting secured and unsecured wireless networks and mapping them. The rules of legitimate wardriving are never to connect to one of the networks you detect … just detect and map. The purpose of wardriving is to determine the level of security in a given area. I have driven our small town and have found hundreds of hotspots (wireless network access points). 68% of those are not secured at all, allowing anyone who wants to do it to connect to the network. At best, they just steal bandwidth. At worst, they can get into your computer and cause harm, steal identities, etc.. Basic computer skills ought to include essential security practices and best practices with regard to networking.
