According to a December 2004 study, approximately 60-70 percent of all wi-fi networks are insecure.
Although there is a lot of information on securing wireless networks, most of this information emphases on corporate networks.
Wi-fi security is imperative in the home for the same reasons why it is important in corporations.
If you have an unsecured network in your home, anyone in close closeness can spy on your online activities.
Depending on how your home network is configured, someone could even gain full access to your computer's hard drive above an unsecured wi-fi network.
Even if no one is around that wants to spy on you or perform some malicious action in opposition to you, your neighbors could wipe off of your Internet connection.
This would not only divest you of bandwidth that you are paying for, but if your neighbor conducted some illegal activity while online, it could be traced back to your network.
Right now, one might be wondering what the odds are of any of these things ever occurrence.
If you have an unsecured connection, the odds of it being oppressed are pretty good.
About four years ago, I was asked by one of the companies that I was writing for at the time to do an experimentation to see how many wi-fi networks I could detect and how many of those networks were apprehensive.
To perform the experiment, I loaded a copy of Net Stumbler onto my laptop and had my wife drive me about while I tried to detect wireless networks.
During my experiment I managed to identify seven networks and none of them were secure.
Seven wireless networks certainly aren't many, but there are some things to keep in mind.
First, I live in the middle of nowhere in a rural part of South Carolina, not in a densely populated place like New York City.
Second, I was using a stock Wi-Fi card without any type of external antenna.
Third, I was attempting to detect wireless networks from a moving vehicle, using a Wi-Fi card that had a relatively short range.
Fourth, this was four years ago.
If I detected that many networks, four years ago, in the middle of nowhere, under conditions that would give me poor reception, can you imagine how many networks are in use today? Wi-fi networks are all over, and the vast majority of them are insecure.
In fact, as of December 2004, an estimated 60 to 70 percent of all wireless networks did not use any type of encryption.
My dot is that wireless networks are everywhere and the majority of them are insecure, and the bad guys know this.
Hackers habitually engage in a practice called war walking.
War walking is similar to my small experiment.
It's basically a trip on foot, by car, by airplane, or whatever to try to place wireless networks.
At first it might not seem like a huge deal if a hacker knows that you have a wireless network.
After all, most of your neighbors likely have wireless networks too.
Besides, wireless networks have a relatively short range and it would be easy to spot someone sitting in front of your house with a laptop.
The problem is that even though your wireless access point may have a short range, it is possible to make a home-based antenna that can receive your network's signal from many miles away.
In fact, if a straight line of sight is available, it is possible to make a Wi-Fi antenna out of a Pringles can that can cut off a Wi-Fi signal from up to ten miles away.
Hackers no longer need to sit in a car in front of your house to hack your wireless network.