Some computer threats aren’t immediately apparent, and they aren’t often talked about by the so-called experts. They’re risks that you can’t block by just turning on your anti-virus software or by avoiding certain email attachments. Let’s look at seven of these threats now.
1—Unprotected Home WiFi
The easiest wireless router to connect to is the unprotected wireless router. There’s no password, so there’s no hassle when you want to connect. That’s a tempting reason to setup your home router with an open connection, but I suggest you take the extra few minutes to password-protect your router.
There’s two reasons—privacy and liability. I’ll discuss privacy in another section because the liability part can get you sent to jail.
If you own an open router, anyone can connect to the Internet through your router. Sure, that means they can hog your bandwidth, but that isn’t as much as a problem as when they use your Internet connection to do something illegal—such as download child pornography.
When the police discover someone do something illegal on the Internet, they track down the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the offender. Then they contact the Internet Service Provider (ISP) which owns that IP address and get the home address for the customer using that IP addresses so they can get an arrest warrant.
If the police track the IP address back to your wireless router, they’re going to arrest you, not the person who was accessing the Internet through your open router. You may be able to make a case in court that it wasn’t you, but it will probably cost you thousands of dollars in legal fees to make that point in addition to the jail time, bond money, and cost to your career of being accused of downloading child pornography.
The five minutes it takes to secure your router can avoid all of that, so I highly recommend it.
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