i love the idea of wi-fi in the home...i've had it set up in my other apartment...now i'm hardwired to my cable connection. my dad is a ham radio enthusiast and he knows radio, so he better explained wi-fi, it runs on a radio signal of 802.1 Mhz...with the right radio,computer and antennae equipment, anyone can hijack your wi-fi signal from over a mile away with a high gain parabolic antennae and use it against you and there's not one software or hardware firewall to protect you, but in this article:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3404535/

it tells you a couple of things you can do to slow down a determined hacker, but still not 100% secure. there's equipment out there that can "see" what's on your monitor by reading the radiation and signals from your monitor and if you have a wireless mouse and keyboard...yep, that's another radio signal and that too can be exploited

my dad actually did something that is rarely done...change my mind about a computer related technology...this info is for people not familiar with the false sense of security that they may have been told about their wi-fi at home....just to show you how easy it is...i can and have used my wi-fi capable laptop in a lobby of an office building downtown and was able to piggyback on someone else's internet connection and took a peek at that person's shared folders, if i wanted to, i could of have planted a trojan horse..just beware, in home wi-fi is very risky

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CQ DE N2YG. Your dad is right. Any signal -- wireless network, cordless phone, etc. -- can be "intercepted." I am a network administrator and have a small computer business. I always tell my "wireless" customers that there is no real security, regardless of what precautions are taken.

That being said, most home wireless networks simply need MAC filtering enabled and SSID broadcasting disabled. That should keep casual passers-by and neighbors from intentionally or unintentionally attaching to a wireless network. With the number of wireless networks in use today, the biggest threat comes from people who happen to stumble upon a neighbor's network and decide to snoop around.

If, on the other hand, someone is determined to access a wireless network and has the ability to spoof a MAC address to gain entry, my assumption is that they probably have the tools and ability to defeat additional security protocols such as WEP and WPA, making WEP and WPA, in my opinion, unnecessary. Sure, they make it more difficult to gain entry, but certainly not impossible.

With a wireless network, every precaution must be taken to not share sensitive data. Never share a drive or folder which contains personal information, credit cards numbers, etc. In fact, it's probably best to hide folders with such information.

TNX QSO. DE N2YG SK.

Yup, agree with all of it. I like to think that using WiFi is like offering a port on your switch to anyone in range of the signal. You can make entry inconvenient for would-be intruders, but you cannot make it impossible.

what if i sneak up to your house in the middle of the night a tap your cable? or tap it on the pole down the street?

if you want to think the sky is falling and every where there is hiding someone ready to "steal" your signal then you will get rid of all your "tech" and go live in a cave.

resonibie people take resonible precautions, thats more than enuff to stop 99.9999% of the nosy people in the world.

and btw, just because they can get the signal, doesn't mean the get the data, encrypt it. my wifi is 128bit encrypted with a 40bit hex private key.

Hi Rick,

Just got back from a Security+ class. The last chapter in the book tells how the 40-bit WEP encryption was broken in about 7 hours. That class really opened my eyes.

The instructor said the reason hackers "hijack" computers is to form a super computer to run computations to break all the encryptions. 128-bit breaking is just around the corner...

No cave for me, though!!