A recent poll, conducted by Wakefield Research, suggests that 32 percent of folks out there have admitted to trying to access a Wi-Fi network that belongs to someone else. That low?
The numbers have increased from previous polls. Back in December 2008, 18 percent of of folks had admitted to trying to access other people’s Wi-Fi networks.
The Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry group whose goal consists of “driving adoption of a single worldwide standard for high-speed wireless local area networking,” has used the opportunity to remind people of the obvious.
•If at all possible don’t use WEP (which can be cracked in only a few minutes, and I’m speaking from experience here)
• Don’t use simple passwords that could be easily attacked with a dictionary attack (“password,” “password123,” etc.)
And here’s one more tip: don’t use public Wi-Fi networks to do any “serious” Internetting. All it takes is one wise guy running a man-in-the-middle attack to steal your private information.
