Do you think leaving your home WiFi connection wide open for others to enjoy is being a good neighbor? Or perhaps you feel it’s okay to jumpon someone’s open WiFi connection? Do you even know if WiFi piggybacking is against the law in your state? Before you decide whether hopping on somebody else’s WiFi is good or bad or protected or unguarded, there are a few points to consider.

In 2005, a Florida man was charged with a felony for piggybacking – unlawful access to someone’s home WiFi network from his van parked on the street . A year later, an Illinois man was penalized for unauthorized use of a close by agency’s wireless network. In 2007, a Michigan man was also penalized for connecting to the WiFi hotspot of a local coffee shop from his car.

The federal government and all 50 states have laws about “unauthorized access to a computer network.” But there’s not any consensus about whether access to an unsecured WiFi network with no malicious intent is addressed by most of those laws. There could be an additional rationale that most states aren’t going after WiFi crooks. It’s hard to catch someone commutting piggybacking.

Some Nations Outlaw Piggybacking

In the UK , it’s illegal to access an open WiFi network without consent from the owner. In 2005, a teenager was penalized and his computer was seized for using someone else’s open WiFi connection to chat on the Internet.

A year later, one more teenager in Singapore was given probation for accessing a neighbor’s unsecured wireless network without permission.

If you believe these cases amount to piggybacker harassment , consider this: If your WiFi connection is unprotected , most of the time you won’t be able to tell who else is using it and for what purpose . It could be an innocent piggybacker looking to check his email. Or it might be a hacker, a spammer, a child pornographer, a music pirate or even a terrorist. Internet providers keep track of activities originating from your home Internet network. That means all things that your wireless network is used for – for lawful or unlawful purposes – can be tracked back to you.

For example: In 2007, The Washington Post reported that when police raided an Arlington, Virginia apartment looking for a pedophile dealing pornography online, they got an elderly woman who had nothing to do with the crime . Her wireless router was unprotected – wide open for someone else to use . Since then, there have been mutiple U.S. cases of child pornographers hijacking unsecured WiFi connections to download child porn.

Last year, Germany’s top judicature decided to make individuals with unprotected wireless connections partly responsible for the illegal actions of others who connect to them. The court decreed that Internet users must password protect their WiFi or face a penalty if a third party uses it to illegally download music, movies or other copyrighted media.

WiFi hijacking isn’t just being used to commit white collar crimes. In 2008, terrorists affiliated with the Indian Mujahideen group piggybacked into a home wireless connection of a U.S. citizen living in Mumbai. They used it to send out an email warning of their attacks in several cities which killed 46 people and wounded 200.

Last year, the same group used another unprotected WiFi network belonging to an Indian disc jockey in Mumbai to send terror emails asserting culpability for a blast in the city of Varanasi.

A 2009 survey of 12 cities and 40,000 wireless networks by Deloite and Data Security Council of India found that 86% of those networks were vulnerable to hackers. As a consequence, Indian authorities have begun a crackdown against those who use unprotected WiFi. In some areas, violators will be fined and even face prison time for not protecting their wireless networks.

The cyber terrorist attacks in India are a grim reminder that we can’t be in charge of what occurs on unsecured WiFi networks anywhere across the globe.

What You Can Do to Protect Yourself

– Protect your home wireless network. Use strong WiFi encryption. That means having WPA or WPA2 instead of WEP, which is an easy target for hackers .

– Change the default password on your wireless router. Don’t use a password that anyone can figure out.

– Keep your firewall turned on and your security software up to date.

– Check the law in your state to find out if piggybacking on open wireless connections is against the law.

– If you see evidence that another individual has gained unauthorized access to your WiFi network , contact your wireless service provider.

– Use a VPN (virtual private network) like Private WiFi to insure that all your information online goes through a protected tunnel that’s undetected to hackers.

Have you jumped onto someone else’s WiFi connection or been a victim of someone who piggybacked yours? If you do, we’d like to hear your story.

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 WiFi connections, unsecured wireless networks, WiFi encryption.

Category: Internet
Keywords: WiFi, VPN, secure tunnel, WiFi hotspot, wireless network, Private WiFi, WiFi connection, unsecured w