Lab Notes

A thief used an unsuspecting user's unsecured home Wi-Fi network to break in to a Finnish bank's computer system and steal about $245,000. According to the article, "Finland called on its citizens to take more care securing their Wi-Fi networks." I'd also recommend that Finnish banks take more care in their hiring practices, as the heist was pulled off by an insider.

The way the thief was caught shows that not only is he dishonest, but incompetent as well: as the "head of data security" for the bank, he should have known that he hadn't covered his tracks. The police tracked the break-in back to the unsecured network, and then checked the Wi-Fi access point's logs for a record of the MAC addresses that had recently been connected. The thief's MAC address had been logged, and when the bank checked its records, it discovered that the MAC address corresponded to the laptop that had been issued to the thief.