What's
a big deal if someone enters your wireless router settings?
They could do a number of things.
For
example, they could boot you off your own Internet connection
by implementing WPA security. They would have the password,
you would not. However, this is an extremely visible intrusion
that most Internet subscribers would react to immediately.
They
could enable the log to track what websites you visit. Of
course, this in itself is of little use to a hacker and there
are better ways to obtain detailed information about your
Internet activities.
They
could decrease the amount of bandwidth allocated to your computers
while allowing maximum throughput for themselves. This would
allow the hacker to choke your speed while he can enjoy full
broadband capabilities.
But
there is something more sinister. A skilled hacker could completely
hijack your router while allowing you to access the Internet
through his router at decreased speeds. There's a chance you'd
never know this happened because you'd still have uninterrupted
net access albeit at lower speeds. Let's look at this idea
in more detail.
In
a "friendly neighbor" scenario both you and the
hacker have their wireless routers that are used to connect
to the internet. Let's pretend that your SSID is "Linksys"
and the hacker's SSID is "Hack." Every time you
log into your network you see the name of your router and
the name of your hacker neighbor's router [Fig. 2].
Fig. 2 Each neighbor uses their
router to connect to the Internet
Your
computer uses something called SSID
to identify and differentiate between all available wireless
networks. Each wireless router broadcasts one SSID (it's possible
to suppress the SSID broadcast but this is another subject)
and your notebook computer looks for the SSID when connecting
to the wireless network [Fig. 3]. SSID can be seen as the
name of a network. It can be the default name the router came
with or it can be any name you create in the router's control
panel.
Fig. 3 These are the SSIDs
1,
2,
3, 4,
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