asoa’s blog

It was my first visit to Colombo during May 2006 and I came with my colleagues for a business meeting and stopped at Colombo City Hotel which offers Affordable Star Class Accommodation in Colombo. The hotel is situated in the heart of the city of Colombo adjoining the World Trade Centre and the port of Colombo in close proximity to all Commercial Banks and Government Institutions. It was a perfect destination for a business traveler.

Here goes a location map of the hotel.

I was at Room 405 and I can see Hilton, The World Trade Centre and the Bank of Ceylon building clearly from my room. The hotel does have ADSL and paid Wi-Fi Internet but I thought to try and see if there are any Free Wi-Fi’s around which I can go online and check my mail for free.

I just opened my iBook and immediately found an access point with the SSID of tsunami which is wide open and free to access. I use to check my mails, chat directly from my room for the 3 days we stayed at the hotel. The speed was unbelievable and the speed which I get back at home is not even comparable to the speeds which I get from here. It took me less than a minute to download a 29mb file from the ROL server.

My second trip to Colombo was for taking wife for the delivery of our baby. We came to Colombo on 2nd December and decided to stop at Colombo City Hotel once again before I could find a place for us to stay here for 2 months. This time we were at Room 306 and I get almost the same view from the hotel room as my previous trip.

I opened my iBook and fired up KisMac to check for the available networks. KisMac came up with 22 wireless networks out of which 16 has no security, 3 WEP encrypted and 3 WPA encrypted. This means 73% either is not aware about wireless security or do not bother to secure their networks. Guess what! These networks could be from some big office in the World Trade Center! Here goes the screenshot of KisMac while scanning.

This time the signal from tsunami was very weak and I had to find another one which allows me to go online with a stable connection. I was able to connect to both the aztech newtork and the Firecracker55 network. In order not to leech the total bandwidth of a single connection, I connected my Compaq laptop running Windows XP Pro to the Firecracker55 for my wife to use and connected my iBook to the aztech network.

I was connected to aztech but yet I cannot go online. I fired up Firefox and tried to connect to the gateway IP of this aztech network. There goes the ADSL router configurations page. I was able to login even without a password. In the configurations page I found that the ADSL interface of the router is not up. In order to bring the interface up, I pressed the connect button on the configurations page and opened a new tab in Firefox and browsed to google.com to see if I am online. I’m online. There I see my google.lk page.

When ever I get a free time, I tried to peek into the security of the other networks which I could see. I found out that even though linksys does not use a security it has MAC filtering on in order to connect to only allowed wireless devices which has their MAC address in its database. I had the MAC Address changer which I have discussed in my earlier post which I used to change the MAC address of my windows laptop to see if I can connect to the linksys network. Here again I was able to bypass the MAC filtering implemented on the linksys network.

Don’t you think this people should be aware of such security issues before implementing wireless networks like this?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 13th, 2006 at 11:42 pm and is filed under Security, Wireless, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.