Man Arrested for Stealing Wi-Fi Access…Among Other Things

8 Jul, 2004 at 1:01pm ET Article published in Tech

Toronto police laid a theft of communications charge after busting a man driving the wrong way down a one-way street, downloading child porn using stolen wireless Internet signals. The slow moving car was pulled over around 5 a.m. on Wednesday by a police officer who allegedly found the pantsless driver watching a movie of a 10-year-old girl performing fellatio on an adult on his laptop. Police allege the man downloaded the movie using an Internet connection he intercepted from a nearby house.

Stealing Internet is becoming more common among perverts trying to avoid online detection. It’s also a way they invade someone else’s computer which could have serious ramifications for unsuspecting wireless Internet subscribers, police say.

Source: Canoe.ca

Comments

8 Jul 2004 ~ 1:48pm GHoosdum Sick.
8 Jul 2004 ~ 1:54pm t1rhino Yeah, it was all over the local news. What a sick man...
8 Jul 2004 ~ 2:29pm croc_

Dexter wrote:

Toronto police laid a theft of communications charge after busting a man driving the wrong way down a one-way street, downloading child porn using stolen wireless Internet signals. The slow moving car was pulled over around 5 a.m. on Wednesday by a police officer who allegedly found the pantsless driver watching a movie of

I couldn't help but laugh at this part. Besides the child porn part. Pantsless wrong way-wardriver.

People really need to learn how to encrypt their wireless networks. My friend at UCLA could access multiple networks at a time in his apt. complex if he chose to do so, none of them encrypted and some with shared folders and devices.
8 Jul 2004 ~ 2:31pm muddocktor Castration would be too good for that asshat! He needs a long time in a cell with "Bubba" to change his sexual preferences.
8 Jul 2004 ~ 3:34pm qparadox WEP, MAC authentication and many of the current wireless encryption protocals are easily worked around or easily broken. Using current methods only means it takes a few more minutes for someone to be able to steal access. Its not a major deterrant.
8 Jul 2004 ~ 3:35pm BlackHawk
8 Jul 2004 ~ 3:40pm Thrax WEP != broken in a few minutes. It takes over 14 hours.
8 Jul 2004 ~ 5:15pm Gobbles Thrax is that for 64 128 or 256 bit...?

Gobbles
8 Jul 2004 ~ 5:18pm croc_ I think any sort of deterrance would be enough, even the lowest level of encryption. Most of these people are just using network scanners to find the networks, if its encrypted ... they move on to a new network that isn't. I don't think this guy driving naked down an alley is going to stop and wait for a program to decrypt the security on a network, when he can keep driving and find a new one in a few minutes. Just my opinion. Even if it doesn't stop them, at least its makign it harder for them to access it.
8 Jul 2004 ~ 5:49pm Thrax 12-14 hours for 64 bit, and increasing quite sharply with each additional doubling of WEP bits.

Furthermore, WPA (WEP's successor) is almost impossible to break, because it's a 128/256 bit WEP key that the USER chooses cycling every minute or so. It's a technical impossibility at this time to:

A) Break the current key and inject a payload in under a minute

or

B) Find a pattern and tap into it. Because the user picks the first key, people can't use known WPA patterns.
8 Jul 2004 ~ 6:19pm Camman Even if WEP is "easily broken", simply turning it on and using it really <i>is</i> a major deterent, a lot of these people wouldnt have the know-how to break it and simply know how to click "connect" when XP shows a wireless signal available, to say the least, I doubt someone driving around, without pants, trying to download childporn is going to spend the time to break the encryption, no, he'll just look for an unsecured wireless access point, which are really abundant right now.

Even with "weak" technologies like WEP, if people just turned it on wireless would be A LOT more secure. I went out with netstumbler around my town and a laptop just for fun (picking up SSID beacons doesnt break any laws! even tho this teacher tried to tell me I was doing something illegal..) and I found 250+ APs and I think maybe 12 of them were using WEP and most of them using it were pay access points in some coffee shops around town that charge visitors a fee to get the access code to get on their wireless node. If everyone with wireless APs in their homes just used WEP which is so simple to set up and disabled their SSID beacons after initial setup then their networks would be so much more secure, but, people are lazy and they just toss it out of the box and go.
8 Jul 2004 ~ 6:29pm Thrax Righto.

Everyone goes to Best Buy, purchases a WAP, comes home, plugs it in, and never pays attention to it again.

They don't enable WEP, disable SSID beacon, change key indexes.. Nothing.

The wireless insecurity issue is born right out of the fact that people are, for the most part, electronically retarded.
8 Jul 2004 ~ 6:35pm BlackHawk Why can't they come enabled by default?
8 Jul 2004 ~ 6:44pm Camman

Black Hawk wrote:

Why can't they come enabled by default?

because the WEP keys on the access point has to match the cards and the user makes up the key string to use, and if it came enabled with a default key, people could easily found out what it was
9 Jul 2004 ~ 11:25am Slacker

Thrax wrote:

WEP != broken in a few minutes. It takes over 14 hours.

Just curious, how long does it take to 'break' into a wireless network that's only using MAC filtering?
9 Jul 2004 ~ 11:28am GHoosdum As long as it takes to determine the MAC address of a device on the network (depends on user's skill I suppose), and install a piece of software that does MAC spoofing on your PC.
9 Jul 2004 ~ 11:28am primesuspect Google is your friend
9 Jul 2004 ~ 11:44am Thrax Who's googling?