Cops in Mumbai tracking down open Wi-Fi networks

An 80-man police team in Mumbai, India has begun systematically sweeping the sprawling city for unsecured Wi-Fi networks. The effort is a response to terror attacks last year in which the attackers made operational use of open Wi-Fi networks and Internet-based services before during and after the incidents. We have a brief story, based on the original account by CIOL.com, an Indian Website focused on information technology. The project was publicly announced last September. The police are carrying an array of devices to find Wi-Fi signals, identify those as unsecure and either shut them down or convince business and residential users to protect them against unauthorized access. Good luck with that. It seems like an insurmountable problem, as commendable as the police zeal is. Without legal sanctions to either shut the Wi-Fi networks down or levy fines or other punishments to push their owners to secure them, fixing these open nets will be much harder than simply finding them. It seems like most users, at least technically unskilled users, even when told their networks are insecure, will be clueless as to how to change that. Unsecured Wi-Fi networks, linked with broadband Internet connections still seem to be very much the rule, rather than the exception, as repeated studies have found. And while illicit use is not quite so common as the unsecured networks themselves, it’s significant. A study last April http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/041608-survey-12-percent-of-consumers.html by Accenture found that 12% of survey respondents, from the U.S. and U.K., said they logged into someone else’s unsecured WLAN. Last August, a group of researchers raised a ballon, loaded with scanning gear, 150’ over Las Vegas http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/081008-covert-operation-floats-network-sniffing.html. In 20 minutes, they identified 700 Wi-Fi signals, 30% of them unsecured, according to one account.