Seth Bokelman

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Wireless Hacker

I hacked my first wireless network today, but don't worry, I had my white hat on. One of the neighbors had left their wi-fi network wide-open to anyone and everyone, and didn't even bother to change the default password. It took me 15 seconds to gain control of their access point, but once I did, I merely changed their wireless channel. If you have a wireless access point, please set it to something other than channel 6, as that's the default channel of almost every brand of access point, which leads to a lot of access points (4 in range of the house here) that are speaking on the same channel, which is a bad idea. It's too bad I couldn't easily identify which house the network belonged to, or I'd have set their password for them, and let them know that they need to secure their network better, but I don't really have any easy way to track that down.