wifi woes

valtzy

hey all, a little while ago my broadband connection had managed to implode leaving my router useless. woe was me I thought, as I was left without the wonders of wifi, let alone an actual connection to the internet. so one day, i happen boot up my laptop and notice that this little intel wireless card of mine happened to be connecting to something in range. too good to be true I thought, and whoa ho an 11 mbps connection with decent signal strength, and from time to time oscillates between 1 and 24 mbps. and all of this in a residential area no doubt. problem is, this access point is simply labeled 'linksys' and is not secured in the least. if any anything, this simply seems far too good to be true, almost reeks of 'it's a trap'. so i had caved in, after grappling with my conscience over the prospect of using this odd access point.

and now, the issue. i've gotten some strange things happening since connecting. i've been sure to avoid entering personal information of course, while temporarily using the connection, but I've gotten one of those windows system errors where there are two ips on the same network. also, though slightly trivial, i've noticed my AIM logged in in two places, which i promptly told to disconnection from the other location.

so as paranoid as i am, have i fallen victim to some ingenious trap designed to lure college students to false access points? should i promptly disconnect right now, change all pertinent passwords used and such?

am i really in any technological danger here, in regards to privacy?

wunderbar

just don't log into someone elses network man. that's stupid, especially when you have no idea who is on the other end.

get your own internet fixed, don't use a random network.

ElectricTurtle

While it's possible that you have fallen into a proverbial honeypot, odds are against it.

If you are worried, by all means trust your instincts and run, change everything you can, including if not especially your MAC address so nobody can hunt down your hardware on the larger intertron.

Privacywise, you are in very much 'danger' if the person who owns that network is both knowledgable and malicious, but as I said before, odds are against it.

On the issue of ethics, wunderbar's view is probably the most common, but things really aren't that black and white. The fact is, whoever owns that network is sending it to you. Their device is generating the signal necessary to penetrate into your location, broadcasting its open state, and allowing you to connect. There is no clear intent to prevent outside connection, for all you or anybody knows, the owner of that device may want to allow other people to use it. There really isn't much in the way of of legal precedent on wireless networks, aside from the prosecution of much more clearly criminal matters like people using others' networks to download kiddie pr0n or steal credit cards. In the matter of ethics you must use your own judgement.

Djeet

Many people leave their wireless access points wide open, with default settings in place, which sounds like what you're accessing. If that's the case then it's unlikely anyone is "watching" you. And SSL connections are encrypted end-to-end, so if someone were to intercept the packet it would be useless, so for example an e-banking connection that had the "lock" in the browser would still be secure, as would a VPN connection. In this setup others on the network would be able to see where you were going on the web (through a hub connected between wireless access point and the ISP modem).

Also, what could be happening, is the network is "open" but administrator of the network has DHCP setup to send you to a DNS server he/she controls. Handing out server addresses to webservers he/she controls, which are serving up cloned websites for the purpose of capturing your logins. The skills needed to do this are not elite, and the software needed to do this is either freely available or available via torrents, warez sites, or the newsgroups.

The system error re: multiple IP's, if you just statically configure the IP to one that is "late" in the range, then it's unlikely you'll get an IP conflict. Not sure what the AIM thing was about. To find out the IP range, you'd have to login to the wireless access point (probably secured with the default password) which isn't yours, so it would be hacking and legally questionable at best. Though if it's not secured with default password, that would be a big red flag, saying the owner is aware that anyone can connect to his/her access point.