HAVING GOOD WiFi SECURITY DOESN'T MEAN A THING

IF YOU DON'T PLUG IT INTO THE RIGHT SWITCH

If I don't bring my iPAD into doctor office visits, at the least I have my iPhone - on silent mode of course. Both devices have a variety of network related Apps on them, and one of my favorites is "FING".


Usually the wait to get called from the large waiting room into the smaller room [to wait even more] is fairly long, so if I see what appears to be a wireless GUEST account, I'll connect to it immediately [if not secured], or ask for the password. I haven't run into an unsecured "guest" account in some time - until the other day.


"...and to my amazement I found myself looking at almost 50 devices, including routers, printers, lab equipment, and office computers!"



If you've setup your own router at home then you are probably familiar to a guest account. While it allows friends and family to access your Internet connection while visiting you it keeps a wall between your own in-house WiFi connection/network and the guest account [and if you don't use this feature you should start doing it immediately]. This keeps prying eyes, viruses, worms, and other nasty things from infiltrating your home or business network. Because you don't want any freeloading neighbors using your guest account it should have a password as well. Back to the other day...


Preparing for a potentially long wait at a new doctors office I opened my iPAD and found two strong signals [ed. - I'll call them doctor.local and doctor.guest]. Doctor.local was secured with the little lock image next to the full scale reading, and surprisingly Doctor.guest wasn't even password protected; not that it has to be - I was just surprised. Doing what comes naturally for me to do I opened the FING App, did a network scan, and to my amazement I found myself looking at almost 50 devices, including routers, printers, lab equipment, and office computers!

SAMPLE "FING" DISPLAY, AFTER NETWORK SCAN

Obviously someone goofed somewhere, and when it came time for me to be called into the examination room I waited (again) until the doctor arrived and then explained to her what I found, along with showing the visual FING display which listed all of the devices, IP addresses, names, and MAC addresses. 

It wasn't the kind of information a doctor wants to hear from a patient, but it was alarming enough that she planned to call in their security team right after we were finished.


Everyone that has a wireless network at home, or work, should have an App like FING and periodically scan their network to see what's visible, including possible intruders...


'Nuff Said,
Brian