Free WiFi is an excellent value added service to offer your customers. It’s also a great way to broadcast marketing messages to surrounding areas where people with laptops like to linger. But having an open wireless access point, or even an access point that is WEP or WPA encrypted with a shared key can be a potential civil liability pitfall for your business and possibly even criminally to you personally.
Badass Wifi with iDotMind.com's Wifi Web Widget
How you regulate your wireless free wifi network, eliminate risks, and maximize it to your profitable advantage depends on your or your IT consultant’s knowledge of network security, access point and firewall software, and your legal obligations for keeping records as an ISP to help the authorities catch the bad guys. When I say bad guys I mean those people who are using your bandwidth to share copywritten materials like mp3’s and movies, download (kiddie) porn, send spam, or even try to hack others on your IP.
Below are some photographs I took last night at about 1am after a stroll out with my dog. I saw a guy parked in front of Companion in the Central West End of St. Louis. Companion is a bakery and restaurant in our hood that offers open and free WiFi care of a plug and play Netgear wireless router. They also close at 6pm most nights so it’s a bit strange that a customer would be parked in their car using the network for who knows what.
Who's Surfing Your Wifi Network at 1AM?
Could It Be A Hacker or a Ped?
Or Just A Customer Taking Advantage of Your Late Night Generousity?
What You Need To Know About WiFi Security
Many business owners haven’t the slightest idea about setting up a network or how to take pro-active steps to secure their business network and protect their assets. If you do not have a separate network for your office computers, file or database servers, cash registers, or POS systems from the network you share with your customers you could be in for a nasty surprise. Viruses and worms that spread simply by sharing a network with an infected computer are probably the most dangerous threats to your data, but also are those users who are adept at sniffing traffic, cracking passwords, and breaking into your computers. We believe the best way to reduce these risks are by using a firewall, and by putting into place the necessary tools to make users accountable, to monitor network use, and to have the knowledge and log documentation to respond to threats appropriately.
Unfortunately, the Netgear router that Companion has in place is not equipped to provide a commercial business the necessary protection. It’s logs are limited by what RAM is available. So, it’s impossible to effectively record which websites are visited and what data is transferred either by FTP or torrents. This means zero accountability for your customers while all their behavior takes place on YOUR IP address. I’m sure we don’t have to tell you what kind of headaches you might get when the FBI stops by to ask about a missing kid, or the RIAA convinces your ISP to cancel your Internet connection permanently.
What a business should do is to place its wireless network outside of its LAN with a solid well programmed firewall in between the network segments. It should keep logs of all traffic, and occassionally monitor and analyze the wireless network’s use. With the right knowledge you can make choices about blocking sites that take up too much bandwidth, are inappropriate, or that could potentially harm your users. However, that’s only the first step in controlling the network. And unfortunately, a Netgear wifi router ain’t gonna cut it.
Hotspot User Registration, Accountability, Tracking, and Liability Waivers For Fun and Profit
Finer grained user control makes it possible to protect yourself from many of the pitfalls that come with a cheap plug and play Best Buy solution. We offer our clients a turn key system that provides a secure Linux based wireless access point (OpenWRT A/P software) with a database backend that stores user information, their behavior, and their agreement to monitoring and consent to your liability waiver. The WifiDog software we use has been used in other large cities such as NYC and Montreal for large scale wireless access point deployments.
Besides the obvious advantages of protecting your business from wireless threats and discouraging misbehavior by enforcing user accountability, an iDotMind wireless solution based around the Wifi Web Widget can help you attract customers and push products. Since the first screen the user encounters has plenty of room for advertisements, special announcements, and wifi hot spot insta-coupons you can turn your hot spot into an extension of your website. Collect data, email addresses, share information, and send people directly to your website to make purchases instead providing bandwidth for some dork sitting on your T1 line late at night after you’re closed playing World of Warcraft and downloading porn.
Written By Nestor Wheelock
Systems Architect and Client Support Guru
http://www.iDotMind.com
This article be freely shared non-commercially under the Creative Commons
Who Is Using Your Wireless Network? by iDotMind is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
