How much damage can someone do if they get into your wifi AP?

If somehow someone in a car or something goes near your house and gets past your web key for your wifi accesspoint/router can they get into your computer?

when i scan around my neighborhood i see TONS of points that dont even have a web key...... couldn't someone easily take control of there whole computer from that?

im thinking of just unplugging my wifi if im not using it at the moment?

so my question is.

1. can they actually ACCESS your computer and files
2. or can they just use your internet connection but not get into your comp?

Can someone get access to your computer once they break onto your wireless network? Yes. The amount of access depends on the ability of the person connecting. Could someone have full access to your computer, yes. Others will chime in I'm sure.

- Jim

Your systems can definately be compromised if they get an account username/password, which isn't terribly hard to do either. If file sharing is enabled allowing Everyone access, then all files under that share are readily accessible.

Getting free Internet would be the immediate resource available (so long as DHCP is turned on and MAC filtering is disabled or bypassed).

It depends on how locked down your computers connected to the AP are. They prolly will not be able to alter your files or operating system, but they can sniff packets being sent and obtain usernames, passwords, and personal data sent to websites that don't use any encryption. This is why it's good to occasionally log into your access point and see if there is any devices on there that you don't recognize.

Other than getting personal data that I send to unsecure websites, the most damage they could prolly do to my AP is flash the firmware with a some file containing gibberish. Doing this will render my wireless router useless, causing me to buy another one.

Just to be safe, I always turn mine when I'm not using it. Paranoid is prepared.

besides turning off ssid broadcast, turning on mac filtering, and enabling a web key , having a fire wall that blocks access from your access point

what else can u do?

It's certainly possible that they can get into your computer if you have filesharing enabled. On my university virtually every single person on the network has a shared folder, so I could just run around putting files on people's pc's if i wanted to. The simple solution is to use WPA and a MAC address filter. It can be worked around, but unless someone specifically wants to get into your PC, they'll go on to an easier target.

yes use WPA encryption over WEP (not web) because it is much stronger if your hardware supports it.

Free internet would be a relatively minor concern, I usually try and change my wireless SSID and password at least once a week, and have WPA turned on. It's good practice to change things up once and a while, it just adds a thin layer of additional security. If your not running wireless at all in your home, it's just a risk leaving it enabled on the AP.

File sharing is a different story, on all of my machines... simple file sharing is turned off, and the file server only allows authenticated users to see the public files, and 3 users for the private ones.

If you have WinXP Pro or win2kpro its kindof fun playing with the access permissions


~ Gos

free internet is the criminal-hackers dream because they can use your connection to do any illegal thing they want, so don't be surprised when the FBI shows up at your house to confiscate all your computers.

brakezone said:

free internet is the criminal-hackers dream because they can use your connection to do any illegal thing they want, so don't be surprised when the FBI shows up at your house to confiscate all your computers.

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Exactly what I was going to say. Bunch of hackers (or wannabe hackers) hijack a bunch of wifi connections and perform a DDOS attack on a site or something. In the end you may not be held responsible, but they are going to investigate you pretty thoroughly.

cradivonyk said:

Exactly what I was going to say. Bunch of hackers (or wannabe hackers) hijack a bunch of wifi connections and perform a DDOS attack on a site or something. In the end you may not be held responsible, but they are going to investigate you pretty thoroughly.

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Yeah that's more of a hassle than serious damage though...

My biggest issue is hearing of people d/l kiddy porn from open APs. A charge like that can stick to you no matter how innocent you are.

I think it should be a law that wireless AP's be locked down. Unsecured wireless AP's enable various illegal activities to take place, which could certainly implicate innocent people as having committed a crime.

Zatrix said:

besides turning off ssid broadcast, turning on mac filtering, and enabling a web key , having a fire wall that blocks access from your access point

what else can u do?

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Ditch the wireless and go hard wired. Only way in is to Plug in.

Gunlance said:

Ditch the wireless and go hard wired. Only way in is to Plug in.

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I would almost agree with that. Being wired is just so much better in terms of speed and security. It also helps me out with WinXP home networking. On the other hand, wireless is just so convenient. I can take my laptop and watch tv while im online. i cant drag a cable around the house...

under the condition that you use a very long completely random key, I think WPA is pretty good. From what i've seen the method used against WPA is brute force and dictionary, which will take forever against a long random key. WEP can be broken too quickly and mac addresses can be easily be bypassed by packet sniffing, making WEP a gaping security threat.

I don't think it's okay to talk about methods hackers might use to crack WPA other than abstractly, so I will not really talk about details, but hackers may drive around and get encrypted packets for WPA and try to crack them on their own time, so WPA with a weak key may even be worse than WEP. Also, you have to keep in mind that decryption is easy to multiprocess, and with the newer more powerful computers, hackers could sniff WPA packets from many different networks and try to decrypt them all at once in a huge operation with alot of CPU power. As a result, I believe that even WPA has security limitations, especially when you consider the future of wireless.

My recommendation is to lower the signal strength as much as possible and use the longest and most random key possible. Employ Mac address filtering and configure the router to only allow certain machines access to the internet, if possible using something other than mac addresses.

I would say always use hardwired except where wireless becomes necessary. Everything that is wireless is broadcasted so that anything nearby can pick up the data; on the other hand, hard wired switched ethernet splits everything up so that the packets can't be sniffed even from other places on the same network.

They can do a lot of damage. If your PC is very secure, they probably can't get access to it, but if you have drives shared and such, it's very easy to get access to them.

If they're very talented, they can probably hack into your pc if it's windows based, windows isn't very secure and there are a lot of vulnerabilities known and worms and such.

It really depends how badly they want to hack in.

Use WPA.

Personally, I use a firewall, and segregate my network into green, blue, and red zones, so that even if my wireless were hacked, it would grant them no access to my wired network. My wireless uses WPA2 w/ AES and MAC address filtering, and I use SNORT intrusion detection on my ipcop box. Also, I use highly secure passwords on everything that people might ever get access to, and I run linux as it's much less hackable.

Whenever my computer is on my wireless ap will be unplugged. only time it will ever be operational is when my comp is off and i need to connect my psp , ds, other non computer devices for internet access.

Comments, concerns, ideas?

brakezone said:

I think it should be a law that wireless AP's be locked down. Unsecured wireless AP's enable various illegal activities to take place, which could certainly implicate innocent people as having committed a crime.

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Better yet, it should be illegal to knowingly use someone elses wifi without express permission.