I have a wireless network at home (which is reasonably secured with passwords, WEP, etc.) and this weekend, just out of curiosity, I looked to see if there were any other wi-fi stuff going on in my neighborhood. Sure enough, there were 5 other networks my laptop could pick up, 3 of which were absolutley unprotected - - I easily could access them and surf on someone else's dime.

Yeh, I made that mistake once. And I kid you not that my mistake keeps me up at night.

We have a wireless network at my house. Normally it's running 128-bit WEP and has a white-list of MAC addresses, and the whole internet connection is behind a firewall. It's not air tight, but good enough for my tastes.

At one point, my brother had friends over for a LAN party so I disconnected the AP from our main network and they used it for their little sub-network. To make things easier I disabled my security and such.

When they were done I put the AP back on my network so I could browse the Internet with my laptops wirelessly. Unfortunately a few months later I noticed some strange traffic going on. I found out some people were using my network to access the Internet and browse our network. Then I remembered I disabled my wireless security for my brother's party and almost sh!t my pants.

Now, this was only mildly scary, but what's worse is that we have stuff on shared network drives. BIG stuff like our TAX RECORDS, online receipts, serial numbers for purchased software (some of which belongs to my company). They had access to ALL of it.

I know one of the people that accessed the network; she's a banker across the street so I don't think I have to worry about her. But there are some high school kids in the houses around me, and sometimes it keeps me up at night as to how bad things might become due to my stupid mistake. I mean through the tax files they theoretically have access to our social security numbers and bank account numbers. Identity theft for dummies!

Meanwhile, I always thought that I always had security through environment. May last AP could barely leave the room so I figured my new one couldn't leave the house. I guess my new one is better than I thought because all my immediate neighbors could access it.

Seriously, I'm paranoid about it now. I know it was wrong to have such sensitive info on a network drive, but my mom needed access to her tax files from 2 computers and at the time I didn't think much about the security.



So, how screwed am I. Seriously, I want to know!!!

"Space. It seems to go on and on forever. But then you get to the end and a gorilla starts throwing barrels at you."
-Fry, Futurmama
This comment was edited on May 2, 15:50.