A newspaper article today describes the behavior, that of using some one’s bandwidth, as akin to reading someone else’s newspaper over their shoulder. Ethical or not, WiFi makes this practice easy and many out of town road warriors have begun to depend on its availability. Experts estimate that only 30 percent of all WiFi installations have been secured. This means that most wireless access point are free (or assumed by many of us to be). Internet security does have a learning curve. An excellent source to become enlightened is Richard Gibson’s Security Now website. He features a weekly 35 minute podcast that explains the elegant design of inter networking at the same time pointing out, for example, a now obvious omission: the total absence of security on your Ethernet (LAN). The architects of the net never foresaw the need for security on your local area network. They assumed that anyone in your household or on the office LAN would be trustworthy. Read: There isNO inherant security built in, nada, zip, zilch! A WiFi access point is configured, by default (go figure), as public. It is therefore wide open and subject to eavesdropping aka man in the middle. The only way to lock down your network is to keep the unworthy out. Take an hour and become informed. Activate the WPA encryption for your router. Piggybackers know your network ID. It broadcasts the universal piggyback invitation code signal: Linksys 😉