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We’ve just been watching a great video over on Channel9. Dan Appleman of APress Publishing talks about how users should be educate and trained about security. He talks in general about all the major big security issues for the security naive users. Please go watch it …

Dan Appleman - What are some security tips? #

Once you’ve seen it go try his Security Quiz. You may be surprised at your result!

Anders Molin has questioned The Ethics of War Driving or so called “Security Experts”. Our own John Thomson has responded to his charges, along with some interesting comments from other readers. Let us say that when it comes to network intrusions, wireless networks are a significant threat to both companies and home users.

We would like to point out at this point that we are not lawyers. However, it is our understanding that it is not illegal to WarDrive unless you make an attempt, by intention or by accident, to access the resources of another person’s network without their permission, which is well defined in The Computer Misuse Act 1990. A concise guide to the Act is presented on The Home Office Website.

When WarDriving, no attempt should be made to access the programs or data being held on the networks being found. Best advice is to ensure your Stumbling device doesn’t even associate to the network. This is done by disabling TCPIP while WarDriving.

Let us leave everyone with a thought ….

Would you allow paedophiles to use your computer to download child pornography? So why do you allow everyone to have free access to your Internet connection by virtue of your open wireless access point!

Checkout Kazaa Rates as Worst Pest on CA’s Spyware List. An interesting read.

A few weeks ago we assisted a customer in getting rid of a number of Spyware, data miners and other pests from their system. It now appears that they believe us when we say don’t use Kazaa or anything similar if you value your system security and your own privacy.

Following on from the earlier posting this week, we are delighted to now have the necessary facilities to publish a few war maps.

The overall map:

We’ve pulled the individual maps after discovering that the information being mapped isn’t correct. A bug seems to be present in either Netstumbler’s Summary Reporting or StumbVert’s mapping abilities! They may be back after we have verified the correctness of the collated data and the subsequent mapping.

No real coding done at this evening’s eXtreme Wednesday. However, we did discuss all kinds of interesting things from developer related stuff, through “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and all the way to War Driving.

I had earlier this evening discovered that the Tom Tom Navigator GPS could function along with Mini Stumbler with some minor tweaking of the COM settings. Following a demo in the Filmhouse, without any GPS, it was decided to do some War Driving on the way home.

The set-up consisted of a Dell Axim, Dell Truemobile 1180 CF card, Tom Tom GPS and Mini Stumbler. Within a few seconds we had identified four access points in Lothian Road. The trip out of Edinburgh into Dunfermline then onto Freuchie revealed 32 acquired access points in total. Perhaps if we had been driving slower then this number could have been greatly increased. Perhaps if it wasn’t midnight then more access points may have been switched on.

Most alarming was the following stats:

o 3 were in their complete factory default state
o 2 were in their factory default state with the exception of having WEP enabled
o 15 had no protection enabled at all (a few of which was due to the factory default being no WEP)

This means that approximately 50% of the access points we discovered were open. Admittedly, some were service provider points such as BT OpenZone but a significant number were not! We’ll never know if these access points were open as some kind of freedom of usage or due to ignorance of the owners. Come on everyone, secure your wireless now! It isn’t difficult and will stop undesirables from abusing your connection, computers and network.

Colin Mackay was well impressed, alarmed and generally left with a longing for more knowledge on the subject.

We’ll maybe post a map in the next few days with our results. Just waiting on Map Point software arriving in the next day or so. It is then possible to use StumbVert to plot the locations onto detailed OS quality maps!