Throughout the years we have advised that you should use encryption on your home WI-FI. There are ma y reasons for this, including keeping your data confidential, but not having encryption enabled on your home WI-FI can put you at serious risk of having your doors knocked down and being arrested for downloading child pornography.

You think it can’t happen to you? That’s what other people have thought before the police or FBI came to arrest them for crimes they did not commit. An Associated Press article http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42740201/ns/technology_and_science-wireless/ explains how this happens. In a nutshell, if you don’t require a password to use your WI-FI then any sleaze bag can use your WI-FI to download child pornography, but to law enforcement it is going to look like you were doing the misdeed. Some law enforcement agencies have made this mistake before and learned to check first to see if the WI-FI is wide open, but evidently not all agencies have learned this simple lesson yet.

Do yourself a favor. Make sure you have encryption enabled on your home and business WI-FI systems.

Randy Abrams
Director of Technical Education
Cyber Threat Analysis Center
ESET North America