India: Terrorists Used American's Open Wi-Fi to Send their Emails
Posted 08/05/08 at 09:53:57 AM by Pulkit Chandna
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Wi-Fi theft is turning into a menace of inordinate proportions and home-based wireless networks are sitting ducks for bandwidth thieves, a demographic that now also includes wily terrorists. A case that has come to light in India will insure that some of the benevolent Wi-Fi hosts will never turn off their firewalls or show vacuous disregard towards bandwidth theft.
An American national, Kenneth Haywood, was nabbed by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) from his Mumbai residence after it was found that e-mails claiming responsibility for heinous serial blasts in Ahmedabad, India on 26th July – that claimed 46 innocent lives and wounded many more – emanated from his IP address.
He is fortunate that the cyber experts of the ATS bought his plea, that his Wi-Fi might have been used by the terrorists to send the e-mail without him being in the know. Of course, their preliminary investigation also seems to suggest the same, as he hasn’t been booked under any law. However, he has been told not to leave the country until further notice.
Several fear-mongers have prophesied about the threat cyber terrorism poses. This isn’t the deadly manifestation of cyber terrorism that they talk about, it is a sinister beginning all the same.
Image Credit: Four Starters
All it took was time...
Submitted by mikeart03a on Tue, 08/05/2008 - 1:23pm
Heh, it was only a matter of time and now the consequences of open wi-fi are rearing it's ugly head. Don't get me wrong, public hotspots are great, I'm referring to the bumbling homeowner who just left his router on it's default settings because 'it works' and wondering why his connection is so slow. It's these jerks (terrorists) that know how to use technology against ignorant people because they couldn't be bothered to spend 15 minutes properly configuring their routers so that no one could highjack their connection to perform illegal activities. Also, a good part of spam these days is coming from these unprotected networks... I can easily detect about 20 of them in my appartment complex alone and that's within range, I'm sure there a ton more...
- mike_art03a
IT Technician
Gov't of Canada
Submitted by Synux on Tue, 08/05/2008 - 11:50am
I can see a day when the government will consider you a co-conspirator because you disabled WPA on your router and it was then used in terror-related ways by a third-party. Much like being responsible for your dog attacking someone when it isn't on a leash. The "funny" part of this is that for the first time Big Brother WANTS you to secure your digital world.
Submitted by AndyYankee17 on Tue, 08/05/2008 - 9:23am
if someone car jacks you then hits a pedestrian 3 blocks away should you be charged with manslaughter?
You've Got It All Wrong
Submitted by nsvander on Tue, 08/05/2008 - 6:24pm
The car jacking was only possible by use of force and is totally irrelevant to what was being said above. These people are leaving their connection open, through there own ignorance or lack of knoweledge. It would be a totally different story if they were stealing someones encrypted wifi password and then using that to do their dirty work.
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