Networking

Do you want your network installed? Maybe you already have a network and want it to be secured? Do you want some network monitoring tools to track what has been happening with your network?

Why should you get your network secured?

Wireless security is important in the home for the same reasons it is important in corporations. If you have an unsecured wireless network in your home, anyone in close proximity can spy on your online activities. Depending on how your home network is configured, someone could even gain full access to your computer’s hard drive over an unsecured wireless network.

Even if no one is around that wants to spy on you or perform some malicious action against you, your neighbours could sponge off of your Internet connection. This would not only deprive you of bandwidth that you are paying for, but if your neighbor conducted some illegal activity while online, it could be traced back to your network.

Right now you might be wondering what the odds are of any of these things ever happening. If you have an unsecured wireless connection, the odds are that it has already happened.

We once did an experiment to see how many wireless networks we could detect and how many of those networks were insecure. To perform the experiment, we sat in a car in Airdrie and tried to detect wireless networks. During our experiment we managed to detect seven networks and none of them were secure.

Seven wireless networks certainly aren’t many, but there are several things to keep in mind. First, the area we were in was not a busy area. Second, we were using a stock Wi-Fi card without any type of external antenna.

If we detected that many wireless networks, not in a big city, under conditions that would give me poor reception, can you imagine how many wireless networks are in use today? Wireless networks are everywhere, and the vast majority of them are insecure. In fact, as of December 2004, an estimated 60 to 70 percent of all wireless networks did not use any type of encryption. Our point is that wireless networks are everywhere and the majority of them are insecure, and the bad guys know this.

Hackers routinely engage in a practice called war walking. War walking is similar to our little experiment. It’s basically a trip on foot, by car, by airplane, or what ever to try to locate wireless networks.

At first it might not seem like a big deal if a hacker knows that you have a wireless network. After all, most of your neighbors probably have wireless networks too. Besides, wireless networks have a relatively short range and it would be easy to spot someone sitting in front of your house with a laptop. The problem is that although your wireless access point may have a short range, it is possible to make a homemade antenna that can receive your network’s signal from many miles away. In fact, if a direct line of sight is available, it is possible to make a Wi-Fi antenna out of a Pringles can that can intercept a Wi-Fi signal from up to ten miles away. Hackers no longer need to sit in a car in front of your house to hack your wireless network.

In short, get it secured!