Eircom Wifi Hotspots

after_shock3000

Anyone come across wireless networks that show up as "eircom" with 2 groups of 4 numbers after it? eg "eircom 1234 5678".

I have spotted these in a few locations in Limerick and Cork, are these wireless hotspots? The all seem to have WEP turned on.

mathew

no i believe they are peoples personal wireless routers. Its the standard SSID on an eircom Netopia Wireless router....
To the best of my knowledge!

You has to pay for a wireless hotspot account subscription anyway before you can use them anyway. So it wouldnt surprise me if Hotspots were WEP protected also.

Karoma

They're most likely private Eircom customer's A.P.'s
Most hotspots will not have WEP or WPA enabled - you connect to the Internet through their gateway which enforces payment/login.

byte

mathew wrote:

no i believe they are peoples personal wireless routers. Its the standard SSID on an eircom Netopia Wireless router....
To the best of my knowledge!

You has to pay for a wireless hotspot account subscription anyway before you can use them anyway. So it wouldnt surprise me if Hotspots were WEP protected also.

Yup, as my eircom/Netopia router shows the same

probe

after_shock3000 wrote:

Anyone come across wireless networks that show up as "eircom" with 2 groups of 4 numbers after it? eg "eircom 1234 5678".

I have spotted these in a few locations in Limerick and Cork, are these wireless hotspots? The all seem to have WEP turned on.

I've noticed these numbers all over the place in WiFi space. Walk down any street in any city and you'll generally be in range of an eircom WiFi box. One suspects that the idiots who purchase eircom WiFi routers are having their personal identifying data squirted all over the place. Most WiFi security (WEP is a joke) is easily hackable enabling one to access everything that the eircom customer does online and match it to a unique identifier.

It smells to me as if eircom are in breach of dataprivacy.ie regulations by seeding kit with unique identifying data in these circumstances. One wonders what, if anything, the people at dataprivacy.ie are doing to enforce the law?

.probe

dub45

probe wrote:

I've noticed these numbers all over the place in WiFi space. Walk down any street in any city and you'll generally be in range of an eircom WiFi box. One suspects that the idiots who purchase eircom WiFi routers are having their personal identifying data squirted all over the place. Most WiFi security (WEP is a joke) is easily hackable enabling one to access everything that the eircom customer does online and match it to a unique identifier.

It smells to me as if eircom are in breach of dataprivacy.ie regulations by seeding kit with unique identifying data in these circumstances. One wonders what, if anything, the people at dataprivacy.ie are doing to enforce the law?

.probe

Probably very little if anything -I doubt if any law is being broken by Eircom supplying routers with wireless on and a default network name being broadcast? - surely the people who are potentially in the wrong are the people who would attempt to hack into a wireless network? and surely there is no difference between trying to hack into a network that has been purposely set up and one that is set up by default? Particularly when in both cases there is security on them?

I think the better option in this case would be for Eircom to supply all wireless routers with the default being wireless off.