sneaky wireless sponger

[Sledge]

Is it possible that someone could be using my wireless broadband connection despite firewall protection?
I have noticed a drastic slow down on connection rate (have 1mb connection) at various times.I have a adsl modem connected to my main PC,which has a d-link wireless access card for my laptop to access the main PC and also internet wirelessly.Firewall is via windows.Is there anyway of checking to see if my internet connection is being sponged from?

[BEagle]

Even just MAC address restriction should stop most poaching without the need for WEP encryption.

Was over at the company HQ just before Christmas. I've been asking them for ages to sort out a W-LAN access point, so when the wireless caption came up on my laptop, I had a useful few hours being able to research stuff for one of our projects. "Thanks for getting the W-LAN sorted", I said.

"Ve havn't - must be ze guys upstairs!"

Oops!

[Toxteth O'Grady]

Could be just contention during busy periods. Who's your ISP?

When you notice it's slow check the ping times or do a tracert to your ISP from your laptop. Also go to www.adslguide.org and run a speed test.

Then disable the wireless network at your PC and run the same tests from there. If you get a comparable slow result it isn't your wireless that's compromised and the problem will lie between your modem amd your ISP's pipes.

Traceroute will give you the url of the server that has the slowest hop and hence identify the bottleneck.

[SoftTop]

Sledge,

try a utility called Netstumbler. It allows you to see who else is in your neighbourhood. AFAIK it's free Try here (http://www.netstumbler.com/downloads/)

I'd be interested to know how it goes.

Good luck

ST

[drauk]

Sledge, just to confirm, a firewall will (normally) provide absolutely no protection against someone stealing your bandwidth via a wireless connection. The solution, as mentioned previously, is WEP.

[Cyclic Hotline]

I'm amazed at just how easy it is to find a good wireless connection.

Whenever I am out on the road, all you have to do is drive into a residential or business area and you will almost certainly pull up a signal within a couple of minutes. Get a power supply to plug into your car, and you are in business (literally)!

It also seems to work in hotels. I would say that in probably 20% of the places I stay, I can pick up a signal.

[Sledge]

Thanks for the replies so far guys,I did the bandwidth test and normally score in the mid 800's speed wise,but when the connection is on its go slow its around 30 - 40.By disconnecting the internet then reconnecting the speed comes back.I will do the ping check as well'
Mike Jenvey
Can you offer advice how to configure this WEP ?

[Toxteth O'Grady]

@Sledge

Before you even consider encryption your first 2 lines of defence are to ensure you change your SSID from its default name and to enable MAC filtering.

Having established this you now need to enable the strongest possible authentication/encryption that your firmware supports. In order of best to worst these are:

WPA-TKIP (WiFi Protected Access - Temporal Key Integrity Protocol)

WPA-PSK (WPA - PreShared Key)

WEP - Open Authentication (Wireless Equivalent Privacy)

WEP - Shared Key Authentication

None

The strength of the WEP encryption decrease from 256 bit down to 64 bit. 128 bit and below has already been compromised.

To run WPA-TKIP you need to run a RADIUS server. WPA-PSK is the best solution for SoHo users.

If your firmware doesn't support WPA then use WEP-Open at the highest bit strength your firmware supports. Generate 5 WEP keys and change them at least weekly. Google for "WEP Hex Key Generator" and create hexadecimal keys of the appropriate length for the strength of encryption you are using. Most of the utilities you find on google will walk you throught this.

One of the weaknesses of WEP compared with WPA is that it uses the same key for initial authentication and subsequent real time data encryption. That is why for WEP, Open Authentication is better than Shared Key because you are not revealing your key for authentication and hacker cryptanalysis as part of your broadcast.

[Toxteth O'Grady]

Most wireless devices come with an HTML configurator.

As an alternative to the way MJ has just selected you could open your web browser and type in the IP address of the adapters and configure the security settings directly.

I personally prefer to do it this way as I hate Windoze wizards.

[VP959]

I can confirm that people just don't bother to set up WEP or any sort of security. When I went wifi a year or so ago I immediately picked up the signal from the pub over the road. Believe it or not he had his whole pub network shared, so I could peruse his accounts, correspondence, downloads from EDonkey (very entertaining.......) etc. He'd just left the wireless router set on it's default name, which was a bit of a giveaway.

[phnuff]

A couple of months ago, myself and a colleague sat outside a pub in London with a laptop and managed to find some 6 wireless networks within rage, all but one of which was open. Investigation using a utility called Languard showed the numbers of machines that were on them, the OS and probably a lot more if we had been inclined to do so.

Get yer WEP's sorted guys or be prepared to lose more than bandwidth

[Snoopy]

Same happened here when we moved house. We thought we would be without an internet connection for a couple of weeks but one of our neighbours obliged us by not securing his wifi network! Needless to say we secured ours as soon as we set it up. There is someone else nearby that also has an unsecured network and they are always useful if our network is "down for maintenance" :)