One of my hobbies is wardriving, the main reason for this is to see how many people have enabled security on their networks. On my normal drives through Vegas I average 40-50% with WEP or WPA enabled. The group of people without any protection just do not realize how at risk they are. With a packet sniffer and a little bit of time a malicious person can gain access to anything sent over the insecure connection.
You see an normal wireless connection sends all data unencrypted and
a can easily be seen by anyone with the knowledge. The reason a
wireless connection needs to be encrypted is the fact that the data is
sent out for anyone and everyone in the area to look at it. That is
what war driving is, searching for wireless access points.
To
fix this you need to enable some security on your access point. There
are two main standards for wifi security, WEP and WPA. Both standards
will secure you from the casual attacker, but WEP has been broken since
about day one. It is very easy to break a WEP password if someone
really wants to. For this reason it is suggested that you use WPA
instead. It is a much more secure encryption method that takes much
more work to crack. It can still be broken if the password is not
strong enough, I would recommend using a very long password that is not
based on a dictionary word nor multiple dictionary words. To get a
really good password you can use Steve Gibson’s password generator.
How
to setup security on your access point will be determined by the type
of device it is. The easiest way to set this up is to look in the
manual. If you do not have the manual you can always find it online.
