What Crime Am I Committing ?

[bow]

The wireless system in a neigbouring building is much better than the wireless in the building I am working in.

So, I have started to use the neighbour's wireless instead of my own.

I suppose I am a very bad boy doing this, but is it a crime in Thailand ?

Could I end up in a Thai prison ?

[Norrad]

Highly unlikely you will get in to trouble. But if you do anything illegal, ie. kiddie porn sites, hacking, spam, fraud etc. Then you may get into trouble. More than likely, the owner will notice his bandwidth is being used and sooner or later secure his network.

[mr_hippo]

If in doubt, don't do it.

[mrt273nva]

money talks. if you do get caught, i doubt it is something that 200 baht wouldn't be able to fix. you could also play the ignorance card and say that you no nothing about computers and that yours just happened to defaulted to their network. Chances are if they are leaving their network unsecured that they probably don't know much about computers themselves.

Edited February 15, 2008 by mrt273nva

[sniffdog]

I guess if they show up unsecured, they are public. So go ahead. It's the owner's responsibility to secure his Wifi.

Starbucks at Ploenchit Center (Suk Soi 2) provides Wifi at a cost .... Marriott next door provides it free unsecured(although the signal is not so good anymore) and you might think they have a IT manager.

Edited February 15, 2008 by sniffdog

[waldwolf]

bow-

Not a wise move.

Your neighbor could easily see/record everything you do, while connected to their network. It is a common practice among cyber theives to "open" wireless networks, in order to obtain confidential information (ie: passwords) from unsuspecting users.

(Hope you haven't done any online banking or credit card purchases, while connected to this neighbors network. )

waldwolf

[Richard-BKK]

In basic, it is illegal, without talking technology 'taking something without the owners consent, and using it without offering compensate to the legal owner' is a crime by all laws.

In a similar situation a teenage boy was in Singapore convicted to serious jail terms, considering that the Thailand LAW on the part of 'legal ownership' is similar to the Singapore LAW I belief that conviction is possible.

If we dig deeper in the law we can find several more old and new laws which somebody could use on unlawful wireless connections.

[LivinLOS]

bow-

Not a wise move.

Your neighbor could easily see/record everything you do, while connected to their network. It is a common practice among cyber theives to "open" wireless networks, in order to obtain confidential information (ie: passwords) from unsuspecting users.

(Hope you haven't done any online banking or credit card purchases, while connected to this neighbors network. )

waldwolf

And why would this be a problem (or any more of a problem than any other internet connection ??)..

Any banking system or CC purchase would be over an SSL encrypted link from your laptop to the transaction server. Theres no more risk that I can see with this than with any other network connection.

[Gary A]

If you don't see anything wrong with it, then no one can tell you it is wrong. As for myself, I would ask the WiFi owner for permission and offer to pay him for the service.

[bkkguy1970]

Any banking system or CC purchase would be over an SSL encrypted link from your laptop to the transaction server. Theres no more risk that I can see with this than with any other network connection.

try a google search on wifi and "man in the middle"

bkkguy

[nikster]

No victim, no crime.

What if I called my open WiFi network "Free4All"?

As for cyber thieves intentionally luring you into their network - I honestly believe that cyber thieves have better things to do. At the very least they would set up their free honey pot network somewhere where there's lots of people with laptops. It's a matter of numbers - if they put all this effort in the honey pot network, which is technically not all that easy, then they'd maybe snare 10 people a day. If they send out 10 million emails with an iloveyou.exe attachment, they'll get hundreds or thousands. Granted if there was a ready-made solution for an evil twin man-in-the-middle WiFi access point this would change. But for all I know, there isn't.

The only thing that you have to be aware of is that you are in a large network where all the other users are unknown and untrusted. They may have all sorts of viruses and trojans on their machines. So be sure to secure your Windows install and at least turn on firewall and off sharing and unused network protocols.

Edited February 16, 2008 by nikster

[nikster]

PS: A classic man in the middle attack is not easy because SSL certificates need to be certified by a certification authority. If they are not, the browser will complain.

The man in the middle attack, in theory, looks like this:

A (you) <---> B (man in the middle pretending to be C) <---> C (your bank).

Now B pretends to be C towards you, and pretends to be you towards C, twisting your every instruction to C and modifying responses so you don't notice what happened.

But your browser will warn you that the SSL certificate from B is invalid, because it will verify the certificate with a 3rd party. So heed those warnings and most certainly take them seriously when dealing with sensitive data.

A much more likely man in the middle attack of sorts is possible when a trojan already is on your system. In that case, the trojan can do whatever it wants - it can modify web pages, prevent a SSL warning, etc, etc. If you can't trust your own machine, SSL doesn't help you at all. The SilentBanker trojan is an example of such a sophisticated malware.

So the attack vector with a modified WiFi access point would look something like this:

1 - Inject a JavaScript or other web browser based attack in any web page victim wants to access

2 - Let the attack install a SilentBanker-like trojan

3 - ?

4 - Profit!

[LivinLOS]

Exactly my point.. If your using a well secured laptop then wifi connections are no more dangerous than any other network connection.. They all are pretty much transparent hence you use SSL between browser and server.