A word of caution

[mejinks]

A friend of mine has been receiving letters from his ISP saying he had been going over his usage blah blah, but he cannot see how he has as he works mostly into late evening and only lightly browses the internet in the night.

I took a look this evening and found he was using his wireless connection for his laptop and everything was dog slow for a broadband line. It would have been slow for dial up standards. I notice the ADSL status light on his Netgear flickering away like a madman, so I think "hello?!?" and dive into the router.

Even though he had WEP set up, there appeared to be a local leech who had sniffed his key and was using his connection to download things.

I've just spent the latter part of the evening removing keyloggers and setting him up on WPA. As his wireless card is from the ark, we needed a trip to PC world to buy a new network card.

I was gutted as this is the first time I have ever seen this, I now realise maybe I should have left everything the way it was and called the police, but alas, alarm bells ringing and hunger made me do some rash decision making and previous experience of the local plod made me nervous.

The moral is, check you aren't on WEP, use WPA as a minimum and if like me you have a decent router, set up internal RADIUS authentication for wireless clients and keep an eye on suspicious things.