Posted: 13th Nov, 2007 By: MarkJ
The
GetSafeOnline campaign reports that over 7.8 million people in the UK have left their wireless (
Wi-Fi) Internet access unsecured and open for anyone to use:
Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) Spokesperson:
Most internet users dont realise the risks involved in using Wi-Fi if you use an unsecured network. Criminals can use the network you are on to hijack your PC or laptop, meaning that they can see, steal, delete or even add files on your machine. They can do all of these things while you are using your PC without you even realising something is wrong.
To make matters worse almost one in four (24%) of us use the same password for all websites, with people over the age of 65 seeing that figure rise to 51%:
- 42% use 2-3 passwords for most sites
- 13% use the name of a family member or partner for their password. Females are twice as likely (17%) as males to do this.
- 10% use a pets name. Again, females are twice as likely to do this as males.
Simply enabling WPA security on your wireless network, hiding the networks name from public display and making sure to use a more random selection of passwords that mix numbers with characters would go a long way to solving these problems.