Internet Intruders: Wireless for the Taking
January 31, 2007, Clive -- By now, Americans realize that new technology can bring new threats to their personal and financial security. The question is, "Why have thousands of Central Iowans set-up wireless internet routers in their homes without securing their networks?"
As he led us on a drive through a quiet neighborhood in Clive, Steve Fry, the co-founder of technology firm, Spindustry Systems, said we'd have no trouble finding unsecured networks with his laptop and his friend Jason Plunkett's "I-Pod Touch." Fry says with confidence, "I have no doubt we'll be able to find plenty of those locations, be it hotels or businesses or individuals' homes." Within moments, Plunkett blurts out, "I can see people's last names... first names... they just come in and drop out as we move down the street past their houses." "(Whether or not we find an unsecured network), we'll see."
Wireless internet rides on an invisible band that broadcasts anywhere from a hundred feet, or so, to five miles away from the router unit. Fry says one of the biggest mistakes people make is giving a personal name to their wireless router, something like, "Smith Family." Fry says, "(With that information) I can use the telephone book or the web to track down whose house we're looking at in moments."
That's precisely how we met Jerry Eaton, whose router name is "Eaton Home." "Ya. That's us. That's me," says Eaton. "That's a little eerie fact, as simple as that was (to find us)," he says. Eaton is a husband and father of four who explained that his college-age children convinced him to put a router in the home office so they can use their laptops anywhere in the house. It's a simple and common way to get more power than the family used to have coming out of the modem attached to another computer in the basement. "We had (the old router) long before the kids had their laptops. It was the modem that was sent to us when we hooked up with our (internet) provider."
The good news for Eaton is that his network is locked with passwords, unlike at least one of his neighbors. As we stopped the car, just a few houses down the street, Fry pulled-up the Channel 13 News homepage from a router presumably inside someone's living room. The Iowa Attorney General's Office assured us no laws were being broken at that point. If someone were to use an unsecured connection to hack into a government database, the feds would track-down the unsecured router of an innocent person. Plunkett says most crooks use unsecured wireless to steal people's identities. He says, "I think most people who are trying to hack a system are looking for things like social security numbers or credit card numbers, that kind of information."
Realizing what is at stake in any neighborhood in the Metro, Eaton says he'll change the "Eaton Home" to something more generic, ensuring wireless internet is there for his kids and not for crooks. He tells us, "I will find out how to turn the wireless signal off when (my college age children) are not home."
