In 2005, a Florida man was convicted with a felony for piggybacking - unlawful access to someone's home WiFi network from his vehicle idling on the road. A year later, an Illinois man was fined for unauthorized use of a local agency's wireless network. In 2007, a Michigan man was also penalized for connecting to the Wifi Hotspot of a local café from his car.
The federal government and all 50 states have legal regulations about "unauthorized access to a computer network." However there's not any agreement about whether access to an open WiFi network with no damaging objective is addressed by most of those laws. There could be another rationale that most states aren't going after WiFi crooks. It's difficult to catch someone in the act of piggybacking.
Some Countries 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 laptop was seized for using someone else's open WiFi connection to chat online .
A year later, one more teenager in Singapore was sentenced to probation for accessing a neighbor's unsecured wireless networks without permission.
If you believe these cases are piggybacker persecution, consider this: If your WiFi connections is not protected , most of the time you won't be able to tell who else is using it and for what reason. 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 log activities occurring on your home Internet connection . That means all things that your wireless network is used for - for lawful or unlawful reason- can be tracked back to you.
For example: In 2007, The Washington Post reported that when detectives raided an Arlington, Virginia apartment searching 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 jump on. Since then, there have been many U.S. instances of child pornographers hijacking open WiFi connections to download kiddie porn.
Last year, Germany's top judicature decided to make individuals with unprotected wireless connections partly to blame for the crimes of others who use them. The court ruled that Internet users must password protect their WiFi or face a fine if another party uses it to illegally download music, movies or other copyrighted media.
WiFi hacking isn't just being used to commit white collar crimes. In 2008, terrorists affiliated with the Indian Mujahideen group hacked 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 multiple cities which murdered 46 people and wounded 200.
Last year, the same group used another unsecured 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 connections by Deloite and Data Security Council of India found that 86% of those networks were vulnerable to hackers. As a result , Indian police have begun a crackdown against those who use unprotected WiFi. In some cities , violators will be fined and even face jail time for failing to secure their wireless networks.
The cyber terrorist strikes in India are a grim reminder that we can't be in charge of what happens on unsecured WiFi networks anywhere in the world .
What You Can Do to Protect Yourself
- encryption/">WiFi encryption. That means having WPA or WPA2 instead of WEP, which is an easy mark for hackers.
- Change the preset password on your wireless router. Don't use a password that anyone can guess .
- Keep your firewall set to on and your security software up to date.
- Check the law in your state to find out if piggybacking on open wireless connections is illegal .
- If you see evidence that someone else 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 secure tunnel that's undetected to hackers.
Have you borrowed someone else's WiFi connection or been a victim of someone who borrowed yours? If you do, we'd like to hear your story. -- 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, WiFi, VPN, secure tunnel
Source: http://www.articletrader.com
