Wireless

Wardriving, JiWire, BlackIce, Sygate and Airsnort.

No, they're not the names of bands at next year's OzzFest. If you have a wireless network in your office or home and you don't recognize these terms, then you already might be a victim of hacking and identity theft and not even know it.

As computer technology advances, more and more users have taken advantage of wireless networking, or "Wi-Fi," to connect their office and home computers together to share an Internet connection, as well as other resources such as printers and scanners.

In a world where a park bench can function as an office cubicle, iPods play video and cell phones serve as mini-computers, the risk for both the consumer and the corporate world is sometimes overlooked.

At a recent summit held by the Georgia Tech Information Security Center, Chris Rouland, the chief technology officer for Internet Security Systems, and Richard A. DeMillo, the dean at Georgia Tech's College of Computing, spoke to CNN's Manav Tanneeru about some of the security issues associated with the emergence of a truly wireless society.

The City Council in Mountain View, Calif., unanimously approved on Tuesday a plan for Google to provide free wireless Internet access for the approximately 70,000 residents in the Silicon Valley town, Google said.

Over the past few years, IEEE 802.11 wireless networks have become increasingly widely deployed. Wireless LANs can be found in coffee shops, airports, hospitals and all major institutes. However, as for conventional wired networks, the spread of such networks may have been faster than the diffusion of security knowledge about them. As a consequence, 802.11 is the new playground for many hackers, who are attracted to the environment by virtue of its anonymity.

Security firm WhiteHat has found that out of 751 wireless networks discovered in Sydney's central business district, 75 percent were unencrypted.

Speaking at a hacking workshop in Sydney on Friday, WhiteHat's chief executive Jason Hart explained how he and a colleague drove around the CBD for 30 minutes on Thursday with a laptop to scan for wireless networks.

In another time and place, college students wondering whether the campus cafe has any free seats, or their favorite corner of the library is occupied, would have to risk hoofing it over there.

But for today's student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that kind of information is all just a click away.

MIT's newly upgraded wireless network -- extended this month to cover the entire school -- doesn't merely get you online in study halls, stairwells or any other spot on the 9.4 million square foot campus.

Computer users in many urban and university areas have come to expect connectivity 24/7. There's a cable modem or DSL at home, a high-speed connection in the office and Wi-Fi for the places in between, from the commute to the coffeehouse.

But many long-frustrated suburban and rural dwellers have no choice but to listen to the sound of a dial-up modem handshake, with accompanying slow connections and downloads. Their homes or businesses are in areas that are too costly for telephone and cable companies to wire.

Looking forward to strolling into your local Starbucks, popping that new wireless-network card into your laptop and surfing the Web while sipping a walnut Narino Supremo?

Still, don't let your guard down.

Experts warn that you should remain wary when using Wireless Local Area Networks (or WLANs) wherever you are _ at home, in the office, even at those pleasant bistros offering free Internet connections. In fact, last year the lawyers at Starbucks issued a warning to customers when they announced the free Web access.

Don't ditch that wireless router just yet. Google's proposal to offer free wireless Net access throughout the city of San Francisco--the first of many areas, according to much speculation--may sound appealing, but it wouldn't be the same as the high-speed DSL or cable connections used in homes and businesses today. The chief difference is speed. Google's service would apparently top out at 300 kbps. That's about five times the speed of telephone dial-up connections, but hardly the kind of capacity needed for many high-bandwidth services and applications.

Internet search leader Google is preparing to launch its own wireless Internet service, Google WiFi, according to several pages found on the company's Web site on Tuesday.

The Google site refers to a product called "Google Secure Access," which is designed to "establish a more secure connection while using Google WiFi," according to a frequently asked questions page (http://wifi.google.com/faq.html).