Stodge.org

A couple of hours ago as I was configuring a wireless access point to act as a relay so that my entire flat could be bathed in loving 802.11g, I noticed something odd: There appeared to be twice as many devices on my home wireless network ‘30apr’ than I had expected to find. Since all my wireless kit is made by Linksys or Netgear, it was plain to see that these other two computers were intruders.

Despite the fact that my wireless network was encrypted with 64bit WEP, this protection was possibly broken, and I can assume that one or two people were benefiting from my bandwidth. All my wireless gear is less than 2 months old and is loaded with the latest firmware, so if this article is to be believed I ought to be quite safe from standard WEP cracking attacks.

It is possible that the intruder never actually got into my system; The fact that their computers appear to be set to ‘peer’ (a.k.a. ad-hoc) mode implies that they were not able to join my network, but perhaps they were just trying? In any case, I have shifted all my equipment onto a different channel and changed my keys to 128bit - in theory the extra key-length makes a brute-force cracking attempt 2^64 times harder.

In an effort to detect which home the intruders live in, I took a walk around my block; You can see two nodes belinging to me (ssid=30apr, vendor=linksys), plus two nodes also claiming to belong to 30apr but with a concealed vendor id. Without a GPS module I was unable to corelate the strongest signals with actual households, however I did find 9 other WEP encrypted networks and 6 networks that were completely unsecure.