Drive-by spam hits wireless LANs

Wed Sep 11 17:11:12 UTC 2002

The cost of enabling/labeling may be only a 'few cents more' but the
cost of support when Joe Sixpack forgets his key/loses the label is
another story altoghether. There's a reason most equipment, not just
wireless, is deliverd in 'chimp simple' configuration... 

Best regards,
_________________________
Alan Rowland

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On Behalf Of
Jared Mauch
Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2002 5:01 AM
To: John Angelmo
Cc: Neil J. McRae; blitz; nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Re: Drive-by spam hits wireless LANs

On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 12:45:23PM +0200, John Angelmo wrote:
> Just cause there are unprotected WLANs dosn't imply that spammers use
> them (perhaps its to hard for the spammers ;)).
> Corporations should protect ther WLANs but saying that spamming is a 
> great threat is to overdo it.

	To some extent.

	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.

	- Jared

-- 
Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from jared at puck.nether.net
clue++;      | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/  My statements are only
mine.