Wireless insecurity at NANOG meetings

Mon Sep 23 14:47:06 UTC 2002

On Mon, 23 Sep 2002 14:52:41 +0100 Simon Lockhart <simonl at rd.bbc.co.uk> wrote:
> Someone sat in the hotel lobby with a powerful laptop isn't going to
> cause
> anyone to look twice, at a NANOG conference.

ok, i think we need to talk about the actual threats at a nanog conference.

1) some otherwise harmless person gets free internet access for a couple of
   days. BFD.

2) some hacker uses free, untraceable access to do something nasty. hmmm.

3) some attendee gets hacked because they have security problems with their
   laptop. sounds like a personal problem to me.

4) some spammer parks nearby and sends out a lot of spam. so block port 25
   outbound, don't offer mail servers, anyone who wants to send email
   can bloody well tunnel back to their home systems using ssh or ipsec.

are there others i've missed? do we really care about anything other than
2, as the others have remedies or are else apparently unimportant?

turning up WEP would keep the riffraff out. is that actually necessary or
important?

richard
--
Richard Welty                                         rwelty at averillpark.net
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
              Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security