Turning Network Free-Riders' Lives Upside Down

An anonymous reader writes "You discover that your neighbours are using your unsecured wireless network without your permission. Do you secure it? Or do you do something more fun? A few minutes with squid and iptables could greatly improve your neighbours' Web experience ..." Improve is a relative term, but this is certainly gentler than certain other approaches.

Goats

I'm surprised the guy didn't send every link to goats.ex... He was being way too nice.

Re:Goats

If you don't secure a wireless connection that spills onto other people's property, why shouldn't they use it until told otherwise? You could argue that you're not really encroaching, but I guarantee you that's not true. There's another network near us that was too weak to always show in the list of nearby nets, but was just strong enough to cause intermittent signal pollution until one day I happened to move the router to get at something else, and noticed it next time I connected.

If you let your signal spill over onto other people's space, too bad.

In fact, I wouldn't be mad if someone were using my connection without my approval unless they were encroaching on my space to do it. In fact, I only secured it because of bandwidth concerns and the potential for other people to use it for illicit purposes.

Re:Goats

I chose to leave my wireless network open so that if someone nearby needed a connection it would be available for them. If someone was to impose an unreasonable load on the network I might do something about it but so far (12 months) I've had about half a dozen people connect and download relatively small amounts of data - my guess is they were checking email. Why would I object to that? No . . . why would *you* object to that? The way I see it it's a chance to do something nice for other people, why not get yourself some good karma.

Re:Goats

I've lived in two places where I set up my access point with no encryption. In both places, I've fired up iTunes to see someone else sharing music on my LAN. This didn't bother me until I read the name of the share: "(name)'s LimeWire Tunes."

I don't mind if people want to check their e-mail on my WAP. I do mind when they idle on file sharing services, using lots of bandwidth and exposing me to potential legal liability.

It's a shame that I have to protect my router somehow, especially because one of my devices (a Nintendo DS) doesn't support WPA at all.

Re:Goats

It shouldn't be too hard to set up some fixed IP addresses for your home machines, and let "guests" use a different IP range, for which you have implemented port blocking for all but 80, 25 and a few others for https and sending email, if you wish.

Re:Goats

If you don't secure a wireless connection that spills onto other people's property, why shouldn't they use it until told otherwise?

Conversely, if you find someone else's unsecured wireless network, why would you complain if they decided to flip all the images?

Liability?

What are the odds that a neighbor would use your network and then sue you for the content that your are sending to him?

Re:Liability?

What are the odds that a neighbor would use your network and then sue you for the content that your are sending to him?

Yeah, ailurophobia is a bitch.

Re:Liability?

If you redirect a minor to goatsex, you might be in trouble.

If, on the other hand, you simply mangle the images that (s)he's looking for, then you could say that you're protecting the kid from nasty content.

It's not like you have a contractual responsibility to deliver something that (s)he never asked or paid you for.

It's not their fault...

How can you blame people for connecting to a wireless router with the ID "Free Porn"?

Granted, my neighbors didn't intentionally set their router up with that ID but they did leave it unsecured with the default password for the admin account. It was simply the neighborly thing to do to change their ID and resecure it with a new password (that, admittedly, they didn't know).

Should be legal

In our topsy-turvy legal system, it might not be. :( But it should be. The nieghbors have no right to expect anything so they should have to just accept whatever the router sends them. As allegedly was said by Truman Capote:

The trouble with living outside the law is, you put yourself beyond its protection.

Could just watch

Could just watch their traffic, and when they try to bid on ebay, just slow their traffic down, then out bid them. They'll rue the day they tried to outbid 'yourneighborfromhell' on ebay.

Obligatory Bash.org

One of my all-time favorites. :)

(Mootar) morons.
(Mootar) these people who live in my apartment complex are connected to my wireless
(Mootar) they must think they're super-cool hackers by breaking into my completely unsecure network
(Mootar) unfortunatly, the connection works both ways
(Mootar) long story short, they now have loads of horse porn on their computer

http://bash.org/?202477 [bash.org]

Stealing?

It's as much stealing as sending the signal into their home is trespassing.

I think you just shake your head at your failure to secure it in the first place, decide if you care, and if you do, lock it down.

Funny way to deal with it, though.

Can you imagine the tech support calls?

Substituting everything with Goatse or Tubgirl (Goatse was already done with airpwn [evilscheme.org] at DEFCON 12) would be funny, but Joe Sixpack would call tech support, and they'd all shrug it off saying he'd been cracked with some sort of virus.

But can you imagine Joe Sixpack trying to explain to Pradeep that all the images in his web pages were being displayed upside-down (or better yet, blurry, or upside-down and blurry!), while all the text in the very same web pages was being displayed upside-right in crystal clarity?

Joe Sixpack probably doesn't know the differences between images and text. Pradeep would hear the word "upside down" or "blurry" and immediately think it was a hardware problem.

It'd probably take any of us half an hour to convince a second-tier tech that we weren't trolling him, never mind Joe Sixpack.

I'd give my left nut to hear the support calls on this. (Particularly as I'm pretty sure that those of you in tech support have no use for my left nut. :)

Re:Can you imagine the tech support calls?

I'd give my left nut to hear the support calls on this.

Maybe you can, if your neighbor is using your network connection to fullfill all his VOIP needs.

Feh

Improve is a relative term, but this is certainly gentler than certain other approaches.

I don't really see the point. It's funny as a practical joke. In terms of protecting your network... why not just secure it instead?

Understanding the Approach to this

For those that are struggling to understand how the author of this article is accomplishing his approach, here is some further information.

The author obviously has a Linux server in his house, that is running DHCPD [freeshell.org]

To selectively send some clients to some locations, and others to the normal internet, he assigns an IP address on a different network to clients that don't have MAC Addresses [wikipedia.org] that he knows about.

Forwarding on to sites of his choice is done by using IPTables [netfilter.org], which is a utility that allows you to configure the packet filtering components of the Linux TCP/IP Stack. In this instance, the Linux box is just functioning as a firewall, and he is selectively sending requests from certain IP addresses to different hosts of his chosing.

Finally, the Up-side-down and blurry-image conversions is accomplished by sending page requests from those before-mentioned IP addresses to a proxy server, which in this case is Squid [squid-cache.org] - and then allowing the proxy server to run a script which calls an ImageMagick [imagemagick.org] command called mogrify [imagemagick.org] which allows you to resize an image, blur, crop, despeckle, dither, draw on, flip, join, re-sample, and much more.

And that folks, is the rest of the story.

Open Networks

sorry, I am a supporter of open networks. I think the freifunk olsr-protocol approach of open wireless networks [freifunk.net] is best. We don't need internet providers and we don't need internet provider which leak our communication data to the governments and endanger the freedom of the net. The net should be a net and wireless technology is great for the creation of a real P2P internet.

I cannot support any action against people who use your network. It is against my understanding of hacker ethics. When you don't like it then close your network. But no childish games please.

I may even say that I find it unethical to exclude your neighbours from using your network but I respect your opinions. When your network is open it means: Be free to use it. Not: You can use it but I will fuck up or intercept your communication.

Except

by leaving it open he is inviting other people to connect.

Some computer says to the router "Hey, can I come in?" and the router says "Sure". Now, the moment you put something up, like needing a password, then you are no longer inviting people in.
Computer says "Hey, can I come in" router says "Sure, if you know the password."
Or you can encrypt it
Computer says "Hey, can I come in?" the router says "KE*jd7638JDEJE*834899(&^&#nd&#&bd*e#"

blurry-net

At first, I thought there were way too many screenshots. I mean, ok, we get it. But then at the bottom of the FA, it pays off. After the dumb kitten and upside-down stuff (where they know someone is fucking with them) we get to the treasure: blurry-net. That's subtle and I love it. The ideal prank for the proverbial Man In The Middle would be to do things to confuse the endpoints, not merely annoy them.

The next step is to spy on them and see what websites they visit, and then insert some fake content one day. For example, if they use it to read CNN, insert a casual story about a nuclear weapon getting used in the Middle-East or South Asia, or a story about the president of USA selecting a new vice-president due to the assassination last week ("What?! I didn't hear about that!"), or the CDC in Atlanta is investigating the recent rash of improbable claims about the dead returning to life to feast on the flesh of the living, etc. If they visit Slashdot, then the jig is probably up, but maybe it would be great to have a story where a security study found Windows98 to kick OpenBSD's ass and then a bunch of comments where everyone agrees that the findings pretty much match their own experience, along with complains about "how is this news for nerds?!"

Certainly one could be *far* more evil than this..

Network freeloaders put themselves at risk... It would be trivial for someone to set up a "Free Internet" wireless AP and then run phishing attacks, sniff IM conversations, e-mail, etc. Considering how little the average internet user even pays attention to SSL, one could very easily imitate a bank, ebay, paypal, etc... One should certainly think twice before freeloading on someone's wireless network - and if you do, at least tunnel your connection securely (even socks5 over an SSH tunnel, etc)..

Re:Trying to make others feel as stupid as you wer

By leaving it open in the first place to be stolen, you've shown your dumb.

Calling someone on slashdot dumb - mostly free.

Making a dumb mistake while calling someone dumb - priceless.

Re:You can't steal unprotected Wifi.

Hey man,

I think that someone is redirecting your requests through a proxy server that randomly inserts the letter "o" into the word genius.

Moran.

Re:What's the POINT?

That was a terrible poem.