A Story of Stupidity...

PaddyofNine

I got my laptop last Friday, and it's the first time I ever had a laptop with WiFi. I'm currently sitting here in my college cafe, and spent the morning installing all the usual essential software.

I just got iTunes installed, and noticed that there's a few names "Bridget, Tim, Peter" etc under a tab called "Shared Music". I thought it might be a new feature of iTunes - sample playlists or something - until I noticed that:

(a) some of them are password protected, and

(B) I can actually play songs off them!

I'm sitting here in the cafe in college, listening to songs off the (I think) girl in front of me's laptop! (Can't copy them though )

It just struck me how shockingly unprotected some of these laptops are.

People haven't a notion that they're walking round this building with always-on WiFi, and not a bit of security in place! I dunno, I might write an write an article for the college paper or something. In fairness, it's probably ignorance rather than stupidity.

But I think it's an extraordinary liability on behalf of the college to start a new Laptop scheme, and require entire faculties to buy WiFi laptops, and not educate people on the security risk in place.

Looking around me, I see a girl purchasing something off ebay. Think she's got all the latest firewalls, etc. in place? I doubt it..... Anyway, it was just a thought.

Orion

It's not just students. A contractor who does some work for us sometimes has told us stories of unprotected wifi networks. He'd be driving through an office park and his laptop would beep on the passenger seat. He pulls into the side of the road and finds out that he's connected to a corporate network - in some cases able to browse through shares!

PaddyofNine

Yeah, having browsed around the local Wifi lan, I can see that three different users have their hard drives set as 'shared' drives, while I've watched six or seven iTunes users appear and disappear over the past forty five minutes alone. Scary!

kinkstr

Hack the Gibson

Archytas

I dunno... If ya don't know about security than u probably have nothing to hide... Even my home Wi-Fi network is 128-bit encrypted... Its not that hard to do... But the corporate thing yeah tis true.. Sitting here in a lab in college and I have a huge number of Networks to choose from.. Big D radio, etc......

The itunes thing is pretty normal though. Ya have to be a member of the same network to use it and its pretty difficult for the average joe to do anything evil with it.... And then again who'd want to... So brings me to my point...

If ya don't have anything to hide... Why bother....? if ya have good virus protection and a nice port protector.....

PaddyofNine

Archytas wrote:

I dunno... If ya don't know about security than u probably have nothing to hide... Even my home Wi-Fi network is 128-bit encrypted... Its not that hard to do... But the corporate thing yeah tis true.. Sitting here in a lab in college and I have a huge number of Networks to choose from.. Big D radio, etc......

The itunes thing is pretty normal though. Ya have to be a member of the same network to use it and its pretty difficult for the average joe to do anything evil with it.... And then again who'd want to... So brings me to my point...

If ya don't have anything to hide... Why bother....? if ya have good virus protection and a nice port protector.....

I hear ya, but it's pretty easy to find apps on the internet that let me record the files as they stream off these strangers PC (if I was so inclined!). Which means that if these people have their iTunes music library tagged as shared files, I can copy the music for free as it streams off their PC.

Chalk

PaddyofNine wrote:

I hear ya, but it's pretty easy to find apps on the internet that let me record the files as they stream off these strangers PC (if I was so inclined!). Which means that if these people have their iTunes music library tagged as shared files, I can copy the music for free as it streams off their PC.

thats hardly a security risk is it?
you can tape things off the radio if you want ...

itd take an hour to get one full album ......
56k is quicker that that

Cake Fiend

Archytas wrote:

If ya don't have anything to hide... Why bother....?

Hiding things is not the issue. Anyone could come along and potentially take over someone's laptop if they haven't taken proper precautions. From a compromised laptop, someone could gain access to personal information, credit card details, etc or use the machine to launch further attacks on other people.

You wouldn't want to get kicked out of college because your laptop was used in a DoS attack without your knowledge, would you?

dub45

PaddyofNine wrote:

I got my laptop last Friday, and it's the first time I ever had a laptop with WiFi. I'm currently sitting here in my college cafe, and spent ..............................

It just struck me how shockingly unprotected some of these laptops are.

Am far too old for college:) but suppose I want to use my laptop with a hotspot what precuations should I be taking?

I have a little network at home with WPA enable and the mac addressess are restricted but had not thought about how exposed laptops are in public before.
For information its an Apple Powerbook but suppose it was a windows laptop?

tomk

dub45 wrote:

what precuations should I be taking?

Firewall, dub, set to block all attempted incoming connections. I can't give you specifics, as I don't use Macs or Windoze.