Wireless Acess Points in Corporations

I love being mobile with technology. When I'm in Toronto, I like the fact that there are a number of places downtown where I can fire up my laptop or pull out my Clie and jump onto a Wi-Fi hotspot and get on to the Internet.

Recently I was in Toronto and visiting an old friend / co-worker - I was in his office and pulled out my Clie UX-50 when I noticed that I had wireless connectivity. 'Strange?' I thought to myself. Turns out that this fellow had put a wireless access point in his office so he could still have access to the corporate portal when he was down the hall in a meeting room. Unfortunately the access point was "wide open", meaning unsecure, meaning any one (even people outside the company) could jump onto their corporate LAN (an inadvertant WLAN really) and use the Internet. This is not an uncommon problem in Toronto as is evidenced by an online site that provides a map of the downtown core and all the exposed wireless networks. Its staggering to say the least.

When I got back to my office in Sauble Beach the next day I was still thinking of the security risk of exposed wireless networks and decided to poke around and see if there'd been anything written on the subject. I found an interesting article that shows that Toronto is not alone in this problem. It points out that this type of rogue activity poses a security threat and puts a strain on corporate networks. The adivce offered?

"Start to set standards today," Stone advised. Beyond that, IT managers should sniff out any unauthorized WLANs and either shut them down or show users how to set them up properly, he said.

I couldn't agree more.