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Benjamin Smith III, 41, faces a pretrial hearing this month following his April arrest on charges of unauthorized access to a computer network, a third-degree felony.

Police say Smith admitted using the Wi-Fi signal from the home of Richard Dinon, who had noticed Smith sitting in an SUV outside Dinon's house using a laptop computer.

I'm inclined to say he must have been doing something nasty, otherwise I can't imagine them making a big deal out of this.
posted by mt at 10:36

Informative little post on someone's foray into wireless debauchery.

This is a short story about using a couple of computers, some interesting tools, an operating system and a bit of thinking to solve a not-entirely-artificial problem of getting wireless internet access where measureas are in place to stop it. Both the technical side as well as some of the reasoning behind the actions are explained.

posted by mt at 11:04

After some research and reading for a project, I had a lot on my mind and couldn't get to sleep. So I went for a drive, ended up washing my car and getting a Slurpee. As I'm walking out of 7-11, I notice a high school age kid, war walking with a laptop. Mind you, this was around midnight in a mixed zoning area (residential and commerical). I just stared, as he wandered down the block - I swear I could hear the pings of Kismet.
posted by mt at 10:49

Good post w/ several comments at Bruce Schneier's site on anonymous wifi. Link.

Open WiFi networks are a good thing. Yes, they allow bad guys to do bad things. But so do automobiles, telephones, and just about everything else you can think of. I like it when I find an open wireless network that I can use.

posted by mt at 13:12

Can't say that I agree with Cuban. If the wifi network is deployed - why waste it? What I found most cool about was this story:

Security officers carry handheld devices to remotely check the view from about 180 security cameras, while sound engineers check levels from the seats rather than an office monitor.

That's a pretty slick surveillace setup.

posted by mt at 09:48

Slashdot links to an interview with the author of Kismet. Not surprisingly, the state of wireless security remains poor.

posted by mt at 11:46

Security Focus reports on how the FBI caught a white collar extortionist using Wifi hotspots to cover his identity.

Though he went to some lengths to make himself untraceable technically, past altercations between Tereshchuk and the company made him the prime suspect from the start, according to court records. The clearest sign came when he issued the seventeen million dollar extortion demand, and instructed the company to "make the check payable to Myron Tereshchuk."

The FBI began following Tereshchuk, and in March a surveillance team watched as he drove to a computer lab at the University of Maryland, where he used a purloined student account to send more threatening e-mail. "During this drive he was observed driving erratically and was paying a lot of attention to something in the front passenger side seat," an FBI affidavit notes.

Techdirt rambles on about how silly we "computer security people" are to be worried about thousands of unsecured access points. Well they caught this guy - BECAUSE HE WAS A MORON. Sure he was technically competent, but when you request a 17 million dollar payoff in a check made out to yourself, the plans tend to implode. Do the people at Techdirt really think it will always be this easy?
posted by mt at 09:41

Global Guerrillas on anonymous wifi. I keep an eye on this site, some of the items are a stretch. But open access points, discussed in this entry, can be used for anonymous VoIP calls. Who the hell would use a wok as an antenna though? Pringles can maybe - wok no...
posted by mt at 08:10

Famed Sci-Fi author Bruce Sterling says the Internet is going to hell in a handbasket.

Keynoting a morning session of Gartner's 10th Annual IT Security Summit here, Sterling said, "This is the birth of a genuine, no kidding, for-profit, electronic, multi-national criminal world. The global criminal world of oil, narcotics and guns now has broadband."

And, according to Sterling, they are fully utilizing the technology.

"These are not all old-school hackers. This is organized crime activity. They are profit driven," he said. "These are crooks. The crooks that in the future that are going to elbow the hobbyist kids aside and settle in for a nice, long vampire slurp from our e-commerce."

I couldn't help but think of the DoS attacks against popular Internet gaming sites during the 2003 football season. It was traced back to the Russian mob - legit attacks demanding money for protection.
posted by mt at 10:04

Kelly Martin hits the nail on the head. We've all known this for quite some time, but no one has spelled it out so bluntly.

There are simply too many ways to be anonymous on the Internet, and more so today than ever before. You don't even need to spoof IP addresses these days; there are too many ways to have perfect stealth, starting with an untraceable MAC address on a borrowed IP address, linked into a wireless router down the street which has access logging disabled? and you tunnel through countless proxies and compromised zombies until you reach the desired launch point. Someone who does not wish to be caught (and knows what they're doing), cannot be caught. With wireless, it become a physical battle between a million victims and one guy walking down the street.

posted by mt at 09:44