Belkin Doesn’t Encourage WiFi Security
I replace my flakey old D-Link wireless access point with a nice new Belkin 54g one this week. Now, I’ve noticed before that these ones are pretty popular. There’s certainly quite a few belkin54g APs in the general vicinity of my house (which makes me wonder who’s using who’s broadband, and if they even know!). Every single one is unencrypted, and having seen the setup guide I can see why. The instructions in both the quickstart guide and the proper manual both just say:
- Find somewhere nice to put it.
- Plug it in.
- That’s it. You’re finished.
Enabling the encryption isn’t mentioned, neither is changing the default admin password. You have to dig around deep in the back of the manual to find any mention of these, which is pretty poor considing the default Belkin admin username is admin with no password!
It’s been shown that having an open access point isn’t going to exonerate you if illegal activity is traced back to you, so why are some manufacturers shipping devices with no encouragement to use the encryption? Not all maufacturers seem to follow this trend though; 3Com enable encryption by default, and have a random admin password that’s provided via a sticker on each individual device.
of of writing, 3rd March, the latest belkin 54g setup simply allows you to set the SSID, it still doesn’t set up the admin password or turn on WEP!
Comment by Paul — March 3, 2006 @ 7:52 am