Worst that could happen?

[BOOMSHAKER]

I have had my home wireless router not lock down(secured) for some time now. The reason why is, my wife and I have a hairsalon in our house and many of her clients enjoy being able to get some work done on their laptops while they are there.

But my question is "by keeping it open like that so they can access it, what potential problems could I be setting my self up for"?

[klowndog]

I'm sure they have all your porn by now. Do you get any wierd looks from clients?

[BOOMSHAKER]

hahaha That's why I got those chics phone numbers huh?? there is nothing on my pc but music and some L.O.T.R . movies.

[klowndog]

Nice- Just got the LOTR Conquest game for 360! It's the shiznit- just like watching the movie, but your playing!

As long as you don't have any personal or financial info on it, you should be good, but if someone was on your broadband and committed some kind of cyber crime, kiddie porn, etc, it could be tracked back to you, but I would say the odds are pretty good you're alright.

[notsobig32]

If someone truly malicious wanted to they could wreak all kinds of havoc but honestly they would have to be in range. At the outside edge, you are looking with being an accessory to music/video pirating from someone downloading files on your connection=-)

You can configure your router to use various types of 'keys' and some of them are so easy to remember you could give them to your clients and they would be up and running in almost no time.

[7_Deadly_Sins]

Just make it PW protected and put the PW on a peice of paper hanging on the wall.

[catadrioptic]

An open wireless connection can be sniffed out and used for different purposes,mostly for DDOS attacks,and the worst possible: child pron! The websites track IP addresses and if the feds are monitoring a particular website(sniffing its traffic) they will see your IP address accessing that website.

[BOOMSHAKER]

I guess I am gonna have to lock it down and give the password to our trusted clients only. Thanks all!

[Kaiser]

Buy another router, preferably a Linksys WRT-54GL and put it behind the main router. Set the router that is behind the old router to have security like WPA. Pretty much the simplest solution for a hot spot. If you were advanced in routing and hot spots you could essentially do it with one WRT-54GL refirmwared with DD-WRT v23SP2 from www.dd-wrt.com. All in all the somple cost of $55 from Amazon doesn't render a normal user to crack the books and learn when they can simply add another router behind. At that point I would set your external router up to allow for a different security than your internal. Also, if you grabbed another WRT-54GL or the external router had the ability to be refirmwared with DD-WRT, then you could set times that the wireless radio would be accessible. For instance between 9AM and 8PM. Then it would shut off over night and only your internal would have access.