WiFi Hackers Arrested

from the bad-security dept

Tue, Nov 11th 2003 3:01pm — Mike Masnick

The press is going to eat this one up, I'm sure. Two young men in Michigan have apparently been arrested for hacking into the computer network of Lowe's home improvement stores using a WiFi connection. They were caught sitting in their car in the parking lot of one of the stores. This isn't a case where someone just wanted to get some free bandwidth, but, rather a real security problem on the part of Lowe's. After accessing the network, the men are accused of hacking into the company's national computer system, altering files, installing malicious software and stealing credit card information. Whether or not they actually did any of these things (and people have been accused of "WiFi hacking" in the past when they just wanted bandwidth) remains to be seen. The amusing thing, though, is reading the part of the article where they talk about the "hacker craze" known as wardriving, and making it sound like there are a bunch of roaming hackers out there viciously attacking networks - rather than a small group of folks marking down the locations of WiFi access points.

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5 Comments

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jon, 11 Nov 2003 @ 3:01pm

wifi
poeple dont hack wifi for accessing info they do it for high speed connection which I feel you dont incript you wifi then I feel its legal and I feel real soon poeple will cach on and then start sharing wifi and internet to cut the price of the high speed
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Nov 2003 @ 5:06pm

Hackers?
WiFi Hackers? You mean they were writing code to improve the WiFi standards? Good.

No? Oh, you mean CRackers! I see.

WTF was Lowes doing using WiFi anyway? Although I have heard some scary stories about telling machines being linked via 802.11b

So instead of the sysadmins getting fired, these crackers are going to jail?
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Mike (profile), 11 Nov 2003 @ 5:20pm

Re: Hackers?
As discussed here previously, we use the term hacker in the common usage of the word. I understand the debate over hacker/cracker - but the folks who get religious about it need to keep up with the times. It can be used to refer to good or bad hackers, and in this case it appears they were malicious hackers, which is how we described them.

As for the security problems at Lowe's, that's exactly what we said. However, if the hackers did all the things described, they are still guilty of committing a crime. That doesn't mean the sys admin shouldn't get fired - but it doesn't mean these *hackers* deserve to be ignored either. If the accusations are true, they did a lot more than just jumping onto the network.
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Anonymous Coward, 12 Nov 2003 @ 8:45am

telcodata.us down
The most annoying bit to me about this is that Timmins operated telcodata.us. Is there another NPA-NXX => placename service online somewhere?
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Bill, 5 Mar 2008 @ 6:03am

Wardriving and free internet, technically falls under the same law that its not illegal to steal air or things transmitted through air, thus its up to the admin of a network, to secure that network, if they dont want leachers. Wardrivers are not the problem, its people with more malicious intent, that actually hack and break in to a system. If you have a laptop and wifi card, odds are your your router might have had problems, and your laptop cant connect, so it connects to the next best available wifi network, possibly your neighbors wifi if its not encrypted. Does that mean you just did a crime? Encrypt your damn networks and you dont need to worry about leachers you noobs. Wardriving is not a crime!!!
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