I’m starting to get fed up telling people that WEP is about as secure as my garden shed, the one with no lock on it as the door doesn’t close properly. I never got around to fixing the shed as it’s only used by cats and fairies (it’s a long story) and I really don’t care if anyone were to break into the thing. You should care about your Wi-Fi connections though, and although I appreciate there’s a difference between the consumer end of the market and the enterprise end, you might be surprised how small that difference often is.

Indeed, I know of many SMEs who simply do not take Wi-Fi security seriously enough and adopt a very consumerist approach to it. One small business owner I know recently introduced free ‘guest’ Wi-Fi for his customers as a way of saying thanks for their trade, but didn’t think of the damage one rogue user could do to that trade as a result. Think I’m being paranoid? Think again matey boy, this is all too real a threat. IT Pro has been warning about the dangers of not taking Wi-Fi security seriously for ages. Especially when WEP can be cracked in seconds, yes it doesn’t even take minutes any more, using tools that can be downloaded easily enough online and allowing them to use the power of pretty much any decently specced PC these days. Take this example of just how easy, and just how dangerous, Wi-Fi can be without some serious security in-between your network and the bad guys.

Some chap in America held a grudge against his new neighbours after they reported him to the cops for allegedly kissing their four year old kid on the lips. What followed is even worse, as the chap downloaded some software to help him crack the WEP security on the neighbourly Wi-Fi router and then started a truly astonishing series of attacks designed to ruin his life.

These attacks included sending terrorist threats by email to leading politicians, and other emails which flirted with female co-workers at the chap’s office. The emails, of course, appearing to originate from the neighbour because they were sent from his network. But that was just the tip of this particularly worrying security iceberg. The nutjob also created a fake MySpace page using that Wi-Fi connection, and therefore traceable back to the neighbour, which contained child pornography. The child porn was then emailed to co-workers just to make sure people knew about it.

The victim in this case, a lawyer as it happens, got his employers to investigate and discovered an unauthorised device connecting to the network and then used packet sniffing techniques to try and track the perpetrator. When the FBI got involved after a terrorist threat was sent to the Vice President, Joe Biden, the packet sniffed data was forensically examined and the real culprit quickly identified. He’s just been jailed for a whopping great 18 years, and the nightmare is over for the neighbour.