1) Buy Wireless Router. 2) Attach cables to router and turn on. 3) Tell Mac "Turn Airport On." 4) Surf web.
-Don
P.S. Someone totally freaked me out about having wireless. He said that there are sickos who drive around with a laptop (and usually without pants) trying to catch an untraceable wireless connection to download kiddie porn. The Feds then trace it to your connection and make a house call of their own - very unlikely, but very scary!
Posts: 108 | Registered: Jan 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
If I set up my wireless network out of the box it would have been as easy as you described. Instead I took the time to do it right and now don't have to worry about drive-by web surfers.
posted
Ah yes, the extra step. Double click on the airport setup assistant application. Select base station. Click the button to turn on encryption. Enter a password. Click to alter the settings. Done. .
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
See, things like WiFi make me wish I still lived in an apartment complex here (another guy lives there and said that there's at least 5 connections that he can get on that aren't secured). I love it when people just take it out of the box and start using it!
Posts: 851 | Registered: Oct 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
I'm not encrypting. Nor do I have WEP turned on.
But with MAC, at least no-one can get into my network unless their physical device's addresses matches one of mine.
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
I know a church that has an unprotected wireless network running. I have a friend who lives across the street and sometimes accidentally connects to it instead of her own wireless network.
Let's hope no scary men download kiddie porn from there.
Posts: 1592 | Registered: Jan 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
I love WiFi. Been using it for years. So nice.
Heh Bob, I can spoof my MAC address and pretend to be you, it's easy.
I have the closest thing you can get to a secure wireless network.
I have 3 AP's, 2 for my private net, 1 for my public. Private net uses MAC filtering and 128bit WEP. Then to access anything besides my internet gateway you either have to establish a PPPoE session or a PPTP VPN connection. Which authenticates against my radius server.
My public AP is a plug in out of the box config, no wep, ESSID broadcasting, DHCP server. It is connected to seperate interface on my firewall and only allows internet access. At a throttled speed, and easily monitored by me.
posted
That's ok Zev, I can crack your WEP keys without too much work (even if I can't get on the net, I can look around at your machines if you haven't protected them).
I'm surprised that you're not running WAP (if your AP supports it I mean).
Posts: 851 | Registered: Oct 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
Slacker and Zev, I'd give each of you a hundred dollars if you could actually break into a wifi network I set up just using WEP (encryption, not counting the other countermeasures). Airsnort is all well and good, but nowhere near perfect, and it sometimes takes days, weeks, or months to get enough packets to actually crack a 128-bit key.
Come on, guys, I do this sort of thing for work along with play. It can be done, but mostly in theory. With practical application, you run the risk of getting caught long before you ever get a working key.
[ April 01, 2004, 09:43 AM: Message edited by: John L ]
Posts: 779 | Registered: Dec 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
MAC spoofing can be automated in a rapid way (sniff the traffic, pick a MAC, use it), while WEP breaking always takes time (not a huge amount, but if you're on a residential street, you'd probably start to wonder about the guy sitting out there in his car). One can be done on a drive-by, the other can't. And even if combined, they're still not completely secure. Always use secure wire protocols (that doesn't mean actually using a wire, it means using encrypted things like sftp and ssh and ssl when sending passwords).
Of course, if one monitors which MACs are connected one can become aware of any break ins.
In an apartment building where anyone can crack in my preferred policy is to have an open access point anyways, with bandwidth limiting for any computer but mine. I'm not using all that bandwidth most of the time, and so long as I get what I need I'm perfectly comfortable with letting someone else use it. If something they do gets traced back to my IP, I'd both state this -- and show the police my (daily overwritten for "space" reasons) log of accesses.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
www.airdefense.net Those guys offer a realistic realtime wireless monitoring solution. Too bad it's too expensive for the consumer. I've been trying to shmooze every now and then to get more info from them (they're cool guys... gave me a free AP). Even they maintain that while there is no absolute security, proper measures can make a wifi network not worth the trouble. That's the trick with any network: it's not about making it completely secure (no such thing), it's about making the cost and risk factor out of the potential hijacker's boundaries.
Posts: 779 | Registered: Dec 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Yes, unless you have something unique a hacker wants, most such people will ignore even a lightly protected network because there are so many open networks out there.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Party]](graemlins/party.gif)
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
Ain't wireless networking great?![[Wink]](wink.gif)
.
![[Angst]](graemlins/angst.gif)
![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
