wifi security?

[bilbo--baggins]

I took my MacBook into work the other day and discovered I could connect to their wireless network and select various printers and print from them, all without needing a password.

I thought I'd be helpful and point out that they should have it secured, and came up against comments like: 'why would anyone want to get anything from our network'; and 'it's to make it easier for staff to connect with their laptops'.

When I pointed out that it was their responsibility to protect customers data they said - oh, so we have stop customers being left alone with our computers now too do we.

Obviously I wish I hadn't bothered. Their computer equipment is pretty crappy old windows stuff, and the company that maintains it seem to be pretty useless (as highlighted by the fact that they haven't even implemented BASIC security measures).

It really makes me wonder what else they're neglecting that nobody is aware of.

Do companies have a legal obligation to protect customers data? It reminds me of the Councils/Government in the UK sending personal details via optical disc in an unencrypted form.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Wow... that is a surprisingly lax attitude towards security "this day in age". I would imagine it all has to do (as far as obligations) with what type of business it is and any type of industry based insurance that must be carried.

I know for my company our EO (errors and ommissions) insurance requires us to provide EXTENSIVE information on how we house, protect and back up our data, provide redundancy to our network infrastructure, etc. Again, this is probably industry driven, but ANY business can be hurt terribly by having an open network like that. Assuming that Internet browsing is also available via this open Wi-Fi, anyone could connect to the network and surf the Net doing any number of "bad things". These "bad things" would of course point back to your companies ISP and well... need I say more. I have locked down 4 of my neighbors networks for that single reason. It's not that they have a ton of stuff going on on their little home network, it's that anyone can park on the street, connect, and pull down child porn or whatever.

Most unfortunate that your concerns fell on deaf ears...

 

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3)

The laws in the US depend on the industry. For example, medical records are kept confidential with very strict laws. I know that those types of industries are required to keep things protected but I'm not sure if other industries fall under similar legislation. If I were a customer looking for a particular service and I knew that one companies security practices were not good as far as their computerized data was concerned versus that of a more expensive company, I'd pay a little more to protect my identity and personal information. That's just my take. I wouldn't feel silly for bringing it up if I were you. It will be rough times for your company if something happens, I hope it doesn't.