Perhaps it's worth reminding people that wireless internet connections should be limited in terms of protocols to TCP/IP only unless you actually need file or printer sharing. I'm not certain that this completely shuts the door on hackers but it will certainly stop Joe Public from accessing your files.

Kaled.

Funny you mention this. I just saw someone in my neighborhood with this zombie infection.

This is what it looks like from a Win XP Pro Service Pack 3 computer in network discovery.

[i53.tinypic.com...]

Turn off protection and give it a month, you'll have people parking outside your house chatting it up on their iphones via skype through your computer and your address posted on message boards.

Protection should be mandatory but users who opt NOT to pay a $159 internet setup fee often don't know how to turn protection on themselves.

One could argue that outrageous setup fees are causing security issues.

Wireless is a massive security weakness, whatever it's used for (be it car keys, "contactless" credit cards, or internet access).

If you use public wireless access points, you're crazy. I'd only consider it if I had a stateful firewall installed, plus tripwire monitoring, over either a VPN connecting to a trusted certificate or (if using web only) an onion routing network, running one operating system on a virtual machine running on a different operating system, on a laptop that contained no sensitive files. And even then I'd only use the connection for checking the weather forecast.

Got to admit that "free" makes the sheeple wiggle with desire! Until the idtards are educated that "free" means something else, this will only get worse.

I've seen similar phony "access points" with airline names, etc. I've always wondered it this was the setup for some subsequent distribution of malware or creation of a massive botnet, but no mass utilization has ever materialized.