I know, I know, I often rip into the Philly newspapers. But when they’re not political, they have some decent reporting. This article by Mari Schaefer will make you think twice about leaving that wireless router unsecured (link)
Wireless signals can be tapped by others
By Mari A. SchaeferInquirer Staff Writer
In January 2006, Delaware County detectives traced images of child pornography found on the Internet to the address of a computer located at an Upper Darby home.
Shortly after they confiscated the suspect’s computers for forensic examination, he fled.When the detectives finally caught up with Walter Savage more than a year later, he was holed up in a room he had rented in a house in Yeadon – and he was back on a computer chasing his cyberspace fantasies.
But this time, Savage was using his neighbor’s unprotected wireless signal. On his new computer, he had downloaded more than 100 images of child and adult pornography.
For law enforcement, tapping into wireless accounts is the latest way in which child pornography can evade the reach of the law.
“I think we are going to find more and more of it,” said Delaware County Detective David Pfeifer, who is with the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force.
Computer users, he said, do not often take the extra step to secure their wireless Internet routers, leaving their accounts vulnerable to Internet theft from outside the home.
Delaware County District Attorney G. Michael Green said there were more cases where child pornography was being downloaded by criminals using wireless service registered to another person. “That technique is a real concern,” he said.
I’m not the tech-savvy-est guy in the world, but this is pretty scary. When Verizon first put my FIOS in, they didn’t protect my wireless router. I had similar thoughts, but more like “so if some dude drives around sniffing out wireless routers to go on jihadist websites…”