Drive-by spam hits wireless LANs

Wed Sep 11 17:08:53 UTC 2002

Jared Mauch wrote:

> 	Imagine a few of the following scenarios:
> 
> 	1) You wok for an ISP and have access through them.  One large
> enough that they apply their AUP to their own people.  You have ISDN/DSL
> or some other connection w/ reverse-dns for your personal domain @ home.
> Someone drives by your place, finds your unprotected lan, sends spam, hacks,
> etc..  complaints come in, you lose job because you were a spammer and
> your employer needs to stop, etc.
> 	2) You are a small company, someone does this, and you get
> blacklisted as a spamhaus.  you are unable to get internet access.
> 	3) you have a cable modem as your only high-speed connectivity.
> you have one of the linksys/whatever nat+802.11a/b boxen.  you
> get used, you get blacklisted and can not get high-speed pr0n again.
> 
> 	While these seem like minor annoyances in some cases, they
> can be quite dramatic to the person on the receiving end.  I wish
> the wireless vendors would use a somewhat more inteligent approach and
> turn WEP on by default when shipping their units and at the cost of
> a few cents more they can print a sticker on the box that can be
> removed later that has the uniqe WEP key for that unit.  Similar to
> the way when you go to the hardware store you can play match-up to get
> the same key for multiple locks.
> 

Hi

In some way you are right, but still I think it's even worse to use WEP 
cause then the admins might think it's safe, it takes about 15 minutes 
to crack a wepkey, so instead of drive-by spamming you could call it 
drive-by, have a bagle, start spamming.
The most hardware/software indipendent solution I have seen so far is 
the use of VPN, simply place the WLAN outside your own LAN.

/John