Cops: ‘Open’ WiFi connections a risk

Police said the majority of open sources were found to be in hotels, malls and lodges across Navi Mumbai. Very few colleges and residential addresses, too, had secure connections.

“Although there have been no recent events that spurred this action, there have been two serious and significant cases of WiFi misuse in Navi Mumbai in the past. During the time of the German Bakery blast probe the police had traced one of the terror-related emails to a US national in Navi Mumbai’s Mansarovar area. Then later a father-son duo were picked up for questioning in connection with the e-mail sent by banned terror group Indian Mujaheddin (IM) to several media houses claiming responsibility for the Varanasi blast that was sent from their IP address,” said inspector Pratibha Shendge, Navi Mumbai Cyber Cell.

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The Navi Mumbai Police concluded their ‘WiFi War Drive’ during which trained policemen searched for WiFi networks in a moving vehicle, using a portable computer, smartphone or personal digital assistant (PDA). Mallikarjun Malle, a representative of Pyramid Cyber Security and Forensic that is providing technical assistance to the police, said, “There are many sophisticated ways of hacking. Open sources are not difficult to crack.”

Over the past two years, cyber crime has shot up by threefold. Police have attributed the rise partly to exposed WiFi connections across the Navi Mumbai belt.

In 2014 more than 1,100 cases of cyber crime were reported in Navi Mumbai, up from 350 cases in 2012. “Most of these cases are debit card related and also fake emails, but the threat from terrorists and other such organisations using this medium is a possibility. Not only can they access the WiFi by hacking but can access the data on computers too,” said Suresh Mengede, DCP (crime), Navi Mumbai Crime Branch.

“Details such as the cellphone number of the WiFi user, their phone’s International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number and even the model of the phone must be recorded with the owner of the WiFi or whoever the IP address is registered to. If any other electronic devices are used, the owner of the WiFi is required to fix particular time periods and routinely change usernames and passwords, since they cannot control the WiFi frequency. There should be server blocks on which all this data is stored and the system would detect all the active, inactive, registered, unregistered users,” Malle added.

rohit.alok@expressindia.com