Unsecured wifi networks

The BBC have done a report on unsecured wifi networks in the UK. There's still a huge number of people running unsecured wireless networks. Sometimes while on a customers site in Central London I will see up to 10 networks surrounding me and quite often a good 1/4 of them are unsecured.

When I did my own informal walk around London with my PDA on the 28th July last year, (I commented on it here at the time) I came across on one street near me and I picked up 46 unsecured wireless networks on that one street alone. Admittedly I didn't check it out thoroughly, so I didn't check whether they were locked down by MAC address, and at least 12 of them had the same name so I'm sure they were part of a hotspot network. But it was still an eye opener.

It does stagger me that unsecure networks still exist in such a dense population centre such as London. I think it's possibly going to take a criminal using someones Internet access point to commit a high profile crime to draw attention to the issue. The problem I think is getting better as more access points and routers have easy setup procedures that include WEP/WPA setup etc, and I've seen myself that it's certainly been improved by ISP's since I made that comment 8 months ago. But it's going to take a while before the existing unsecure setups get outmoded and replaced.