Most of us trusty our home is our castle. We have an arsenal of expensive locks, home protection systems, paper shredders and guns to secure what’s in it.

But what about all of our data that’s on the web? Who’s minding \\ guarding that fort? When you stop to think about it, it’s incredibly shocking that many of us haven’t protected our home WiFi connections.

Drive-by WiFi Explodes

That’s good news for the individuals who do what’s called “wardriving” to locate them. Wardriving derives itself from the 1983 picture WarGames in which a budding Matthew Broderick “wardialed” – programming his computer to dial every phone number in Sunnyvale, California to pinpoint other computer modems. A decade ago, wardriving was innovated by Peter Shipley, a Berkeley computer consultant who developed the first software to automatically detect wireless connections. Shipley’s hobby was driving around with his laptop, charting the networks .

Wardrivers are still driving around neighborhoods with software from the Internet that can track unsecured WiFi networks. They can be nerds locating wireless networks in a neighborhood for the fun of it. Or wardrivers can be wireless hackers looking to freeload off our home WiFi connections. Even more horrible, they can be crooks trying to access wireless networks to steal private particular like our passwords and credit card numbers.

In 2004, Florida was the first state to convict a person with unsanctioned access to a computer connection. The perpetrator was caught using the WiFi connection at a personal home from his vehicle parked on the road.

Wardriving is Still Widespread

Since then, WiFi encryption standards have gotten better. But unprotected wireless networks are still very typical; and that makes them easy marks for wardriving. This year, that became painfully clear when Google was blamed for commercial wardriving – using its roving Street View vehicles to gather consumer data from unsecured home WiFi networks around the globe. Google apologized for mistakenly collecting small pieced of wireless users’ personal information during its drive-bys. But the company firmly stated that it had done nothing illegal . Then in October, Google admitted that it had gathered more sensitive information than it initially thought – including email addresses, URLs and user passwords.

It’s important to recall that very few cases of wardriving for criminal purposes are ever noticed or taken to court. That means protecting your home WiFi hotspot is essential for your online security.

What You Can Do

– Utilize WPA instead of no encryption or WEP encryption. The old WEP (Wired Equivalency Privacy) encryption has weaknesses that make it a simple target for cyber thieves. WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access), or even more robust, WPA2 has stronger encryption.

– Change the default wireless network name and administrative password. Wireless devices generally come with pre-set names and passwords which are easy to locate online. Changing them makes it harder for hackers to access or infiltrate your wireless network.

– Disable the SSID broadcast choice, which allows anyone to access your wireless network. This will stop simple attacks, but not strikes by advanced hackers.

– Ensure your firewall is turned on and your antivirus software up-to-date. It can reduce the damage hackers can inflict should they gain access to your network.

– Limit access. Only allow authorized computers to access your network. Hardware connected to a network has a MAC (media access control) address. You can restrict access to your network by filtering MAC addresses This will discourage accidental connections from neighbors, but not serious attacks by sophisticated hackers.

– Use a VPN (virtual private network) like Private WiFi to assure that all the information transmitted over your wireless network goes into a secure protected tunnel that’s veiled to hackers.

In the meantime , if your WiFi connection was hacked in your house, we’d like to hear your story . Tell us what occurred and what you did about it.

Author Bio: Jan Legnitto is an investigative journalist and documentary producer who write about criminal justice and intelligence issues. Jan is also a frequent contributor to the Private I blogs on Private WiFi, unsecured WiFi networks, WiFi encryption, WiFi hacks.

Category: Internet
Keywords: wireless networks, WiFi, WiFi hacks, WiFi encryption, protect, secure tunnel, unsecured WiFi network