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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical RE: Drive-by spam hits wireless LANs
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: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jared Mauch Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2002 5:01 AM To: John Angelmo Cc: Neil J. McRae; blitz; [email protected] 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 [email protected] clue++; | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/ My statements are only mine.
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