Does Sydney have 10,000 unsecured Wi-Fi networks?

By
Renai LeMay
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5


Hilarious article over at the Sydney Morning Herald, which has been war-driving around Sydney and testing out the city’s Wi-Fi networks for security. According to the newspaper, unsecured Wi-Fi is rife:

“Fairfax discovered unsecured Wi-Fi networks in 10 out of 20 residential locations visited during a test across Sydney. In total, 382 networks were detected with 2.6 per cent operating without password protection … Extrapolating Fairfax’s results, there could be more than 10,000 unsecured networks across Sydney.”

This couldn’t have something to do with the fact that major Australian broadband providers are shipping popular ADSL routers totally unsecured, could it? Just maybe?

Image credit: Julia Freeman-Woolpert, royalty free

Related posts:

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  2. iiNet’s BoB Lite: Insecure by design
  3. BoB security is ‘standard practice’, says iiNet
  4. Qld Police go war-driving for insecure Wi-Fi
  5. TPG’s PIPE Networks anti-competitive? Who would have thought?

5 COMMENTS

  1. So if someone jumps onto one of these networks and does some illegal downloading then AFACT will want them booted.

    I guess it would be one way of keeping non-technical people off the internet :-/

      • Was half tongue in cheek. But as we know the law doesn’t really care what your intention was accessing a access point no matter how insecure can be considered “hacking”.

  3. They weren’t counting Microsoft’s famous “Free public WiFi”, were they?

    That shows up every time someone powers up a Windows laptop.

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