Free Wi-Fi that isn’t secure – Tales of the Traveler

Monday, April 19th, 2010 Basim Jaber, Sr. Sales Engineer

While waiting for my flight at DFW today, one guy with a PC turns (to his coworker, I presume?) and says “Are you able to get connected to the free network?” The other guy confirmed he couldn’t.

I think to myself… “Free? I just connected to T-Mobile….I didn’t know DFW was free!” So I click on my Window 7 native wireless client and sure enough, there it is. In addition to “tmobile”, there was another SSID entry called “Free Public Wi-Fi”, but it was listed as “Ad-Hoc” (i.e. “computer-to-computer” vs “computer-to-AccessPoint”, for those of you who don’t know what “AdHoc Wi-Fi” means).

Turns out this was a bug in Windows that they fixed, but many people with un-patched systems are still having this issue.

Turns out that if you connect to this, it “infects” your system…. though it’s “viral”, it’s not a “virus”. It’s just a harmless annoyance in Windows that causes people a lot of grief when they try to get connected to the Internet, because it’s not a true hot spot.

However, had those users been using iPass’ Open Mobile, we don’t even show the Ad-Hoc networks in the client (just about all native and 3rd-party Wi-Fi connection managers show Ad-Hoc networks by default). Another layer of security sure can’t hurt.

Tags: hotspot, mobile workforce, wi-fi access