[X4U] Re: Wireless "theft"

[Stroller]

On Jun 16, 2005, at 3:37 am, Robert Ameeti wrote:
>>
>> Whilst I admire your philosophy, the problem is that you clients' 
>> competitors could be reading every email they send, perusing any 
>> documents your clients access over their wireless networks.
>
> If a competitor is going to come within wireless signal distance, they 
> will be coming looking for trouble. If they are going to place 
> themselves within this 150' distance and try to set up a wireless 
> packet sniffer to catch the signals going through the air, the trash 
> left in the trash bin would be a bit easier. How many businesses are 
> threatened by what goes in their trash? How many competitors are going 
> to be setting up packet sniffers within visual distance of a 
> competitor? Don't you think my clients would notice their competitor 
> sitting in their car for hours on end? or perhaps you are thinking 
> they are in a plumbers van looking like a maintenance truck?

Obtaining information electronically is far easier than you suggest. I 
don't know about where you are, but in my town there are plenty of 
scenarios in which an eavesdropper would not be noticed - we have 
offices where many companies share a building, or where offices 
overlook busy streets full of shops & cafes.

Personally, I wouldn't know many of my competitors by sight, but they 
don't need to be sitting in a car or a surveillance truck for hours on 
end - they just need to place a laptop in the boot of their car parked 
outside the premises. The issue is not limited to competitors - 
although you wouldn't allow a client to view what you paid for the 
equipment or services you're reselling to him, or to have access to the 
contacts database upon which your services depend, you'd be perfectly 
happy to allow that client to bring a briefcase when he visits your 
office.

In the UK, many people do feel themselves threatened by what goes in 
their trash - although that may be the result of paranoia, every home 
around here has a shredder for their bank- and credit-card statements. 
A few years ago there was a former barrister who made quite a 
comfortable living by collecting rubbish left out by London's lawyers - 
he would precede the garbage-collectors around their route, load up a 
van, sift it & sell celebrity gossip to the newspapers. At one time he 
was up on charges for this, but one might conjecture that a few months 
in a cushy low-risk prison is hardly a deterrent against the £250,000 
or so he made for one story. Nowadays I would imagine few London 
lawyers are so careless with their data - even one of my clients, a 
pensions-advisor of 4 or 5 staff, pays to have all their paper 
collected and securely shredded. I think that in their case the 
financial-regulators or the financial institutions may require them to 
store or shred their customer documents to specified standards of 
security, but I suspect that all my clients have _some_ documents that 
are private, confidential, or containing privileged information.

I'm not disputing your right to administer networks the way you see fit 
- it's just that I personally wouldn't place myself in the position of 
being liable for not encrypting a customer's network. If a customer 
were to have confidential information stolen in this way, then using 
even WEP is a defence against negligence.

Stroller.