Wireless fidelity in Tallinn

When it comes to WiFi Estonia is probably one of the most covered countries in the world. I have a personal WiFi router at home, I have one in the office, there's plenty of wireless connections at my school... basically I spend most of my time in an accessible WiFi hotspot. It is actually quite difficult to find a place in Tallinn which is not covered with a wireless signal.

But how secure is the average wireless router? Finding some answers to this question was one of our assignments in the SP course. At home I have secured my connection using WPA-PSK encryption and by not broadcasting my network SSID. WPA is not perfect (WPA2 would be better) but it's the best that my router can support - hey at least it's better than WEP and keeps out 99% of the population.

To find out how others are securing their wireless networks we took a small drive with Ivo around Tallinn and stopped in a few locations to monitor wireless network activity. I used a program called KisMAC which shows you all the wireless networks in range of your receiver along with details about it's configuration (SSID, encryption type, supported data rate etc.). KisMAC also has a nifty little feature which enables you to passively monitor wireless network traffic. This way you can even see all the hidden networks (like mine at home) and the client computers connected to the network.

Okay, so without further a due here are the summarized results for locations where we scanned for WiFi networks (click the image for a larger view).

I was actually a bit surprised to discover that most networks (about 70%) were using at least some form of encryption. Indeed most of these were using WEP encryption which can be cracked relatively easily (even KisMAC has built-in tools for this purpose) but nevertheless WEP prevents most people access to your network.

Regarding the frequency of access points the results speak for themselves. While driving from Nõmme towards the center of the city I picked up over 70 networks during the first 4-5 kilometers alone. No matter where you are in Tallinn chances are that there are at least 1 or 2 WiFi networks within your range. Given some time and a few good cracking tools you could probably get Internet access from most of them.

For home users WiFi security might not be such a big concern but for businesses this could have disastrous consequences.