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May 28, 2003
Beware of WiFi cards left on!
<p>True story.</p>
<p>I just returned from a day down and back to SF on the Alaska SARs shuttle. My laptop is a Toshiba Protege with built-in WiFi. There is a little switch on the front of it with an "off" and "on" switch so you can turn the radio off to preserve power when not needing it. I found out today there are many other reasons to turn it off. Normally I leave it on all the time just to see if there are available WiFi hotspots to hop onto. Today on the way back from SF on the plane at 30,000 feet, I figured there wouldn't be any WiFi connectivity, but decided to check anyway (I am a geek). There was another laptop with a WiFi card beconing me to connect to "beauty1" as an ad-hoc network. What the heck I punched connect. It seconds, I was cruising another laptop somewhere in the 737. I checked out the outlook.pst file, copies of the contact database as a .csv file, lots of business .ppt presentations, some music files, lots of spreadsheets, and even a copy of the guy's resume! I could have copied anything I wanted. Or planted a virus. Gosh, where is a good virus when you need it? In the process of having all this fun with another guy's laptop I had the realization that maybe he was snooping me too! dooh!</p>
<p>So there are two things you can do to reduce your exposure. </p>
<p>1. Turn off your WiFi radio, or remove the card when you are not actively looking to connect to a WiFi network (safest).<br />
2. If you have to leave it on in a public place, go to the configuration settings and check "do not share files and printers with others". This will limit the resources another person can see even if they connect to your computer. </p>
<p>Be ware out there.</p>
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Posted by Martin at May 28, 2003 8:24 PM
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Comments
just like that...
Posted by: BoobSquad 
at September 9, 2005 11:20 AM
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