Stealing your neighbors WiFi

[neoee]

Re: Stealing your neighbors WiFi

your MAC address will show up next to the IP address that was leased. most wireless routers lease IP addresses ~7 days by default, so even if you haven't used their internet for 7 days it'll still be assigned to you. Regardless, it'll be in their logs for months


I don't have WEP on my wireless, but I do have MAC filters. if someone wants to piggyback on my signal, that'll give 'em a run for their money before they give up. they'll have a solid wireless connection, but no internet access at all

Umm mac addresses are easily cloneable. A quick sniff will pick that up since your not encrypting your traffic (Mac address are in packet headers).


**edit posted this before I saw others say the same thing.

Anyone who is interested can go to remote-exploit.org and dl a copy of the security auditor disk. Its the swiss army knife of utilities, boots up its own Linux build, runs from the disk, wep cracking, sniffer, etc.

Also of note: when I was trying to sniff out my own network and crack the key I could not pull down any packets- then I figured out why: I was running sveasoft firmware on my router and had the operating channel set at 13 or 14 (not allowed in the US), which made the network invisible since the US cards are looking for 1-12 (IIRC).

[neoee]

Re: Stealing your neighbors WiFi

This post is brought to you through the miracle of stolen wifi....

My ethical question is this.... I am crashing on a friend's couch for a month in between apartments, my router is in storage and her dsl is finicky, is it ok to "borrow temporarily" wireless?

Is it ok that, I dont care if it's ok or not? I'll be goddamned if I dont have interweb...

I don't think the issue has been taken up in the courts, but things to consider:

The freq. wireless (internet) operates at is in the public spectrum. If someone was listening to your favorite song across the street and the were playing it loud enough for you to hear this would be the equilivent of them transmitting their wireless signal into your apartment. Secondly if DHCP address are being served consider that your invitation to come in. Basically it comes down to this, if the person hasn't made a reasonable attempt to keep their network 'theirs' or keep intruders out I wouldn't feel bad using it. I'm surprised that in a city like NY you don't have the city providing it. Hell, they are providing it here for free (Seattle), even the buses have their own access points.

[neoee]

Re: Stealing your neighbors WiFi

not quite... MAC addresses are flashed into the hardware chips, and aren't changeable by a reg setting/software property. Some cards do let you re-flash the card firmware with a new MAC address, but all MAC authentication is performed on the wireless router, meaning it's not broadcasted to the user. They would need to guess the correct MAC address and authenticate it... keep in mind there are 281474976710656 (256^6) different unique possibilities in a MAC address.

Here's how easy it is:
Changing the MAC address in W2K and XP
Method 1:
This is depending on the type of Network Interface Card (NIC) you have. If you have a card that doesn?t support Clone MAC address, then you have to go to second method.

• • Go to Start->Settings->Control Panel and double click on Network and Dial-up Connections.
  • Right click on the NIC you want to change the MAC address and click on properties.
  • Under ?General? tab, click on the ?Configure? button
  • Click on ?Advanced? tab
  • Under ?Property section?, you should see an item called ?Network Address? or "Locally Administered Address", click on it.
  • On the right side, under ?Value?, type in the New MAC address you want to assign to your NIC. Usually this value is entered without the ?-? between the MAC address numbers.
  • Goto command prompt and type in ?ipconfig /all? or ?net config rdr? to verify the changes. If the changes are not materialized, then use the second method.
  • If successful, reboot your systems.

The other method I omitted does indeed change it via the registry. See the site below for more info.

http://www.nthelp.com/NT6/change_mac_w2k.htm

[picklemonkey]

Re: Stealing your neighbors WiFi

thanks, good to know. I didn't know you could change it via the OS... thought it was firmware flash only. regardless, if the user did figure out the MAC address that I'm using, it'd conflict with my network traffic and would be very ineffective.

knowing my neighbors, they'd have better chances figuring out my MAC address by guessing the one-in-281.4 trillion number. go play the lottery instead

[neoee]

Re: Stealing your neighbors WiFi

thanks, good to know. I didn't know you could change it via the OS... thought it was firmware flash only. regardless, if the user did figure out the MAC address that I'm using, it'd conflict with my network traffic and would be very ineffective.

knowing my neighbors, they'd have better chances figuring out my MAC address by guessing the one-in-281.4 trillion number. go play the lottery instead

You know I've actually considered creating a seperate VLAN so I can offer some bandwidth to anyone snooping, but keeping my traffic private. I want to open it up so if RIAA or MPAA were to come after me I could say it was someone else may have been using my network for such activities. I don't download mainstream stuff at all but once in a blue moon I might grab a tv show and I know they have been considering going after those people too (even though I have a Mythtv which I can use to record the show in the first place). Either way I can say it wasn't me.

[picklemonkey]

Re: Stealing your neighbors WiFi



i've actually considered opening mine up and offering it to all the neighbors just for the hell of it. doubt it'd reach more than 2 neighbors, though