Free Wi-Fi Experiment Show Parents Giving Up Firstborn In Exchange For Connection; Carelessness Exposed When People Hook-Up To Public Wi-Fi

People giving up their first born child in exchange for WiFi? Some Londoners may have just done it, as they carelessly signed a a public Wi-Fi agreement stipulating the exchange.

The security experiment conducted by Cyber Security Research Institute in the United Kingdom and SySS, a German penetration-testing company, involved placing 200 Wi-Fi access points in prominent districts of London. Individuals connecting to the service were unware they are being monitored, but the matter didn't discourage people as 250 devices connected to the hotspot in just 30 minutes.

According to CNET, for a short period of time, investigators introduced a terms and conditions page that included a clause asking people to give up their firstborn child or beloved pet in order to use the hotspot. There were six users who agreed to the terms before the page was disabled, which reveals how little attention people give to those binding legal text.

The tech site also noted that users who connected to the Wi-Fi most likely did so automatically. There were 33 users who consciously used the free internet acess to carry out web searches, send data and emails. There were a total of 32MB of data that was captured in the experiment – all of which were immediately destroyed. But it noted that the text of emails sent over the POP3 network – could be read and even the email addresses of the sender and recipient as well as the sender’s password.

“The issue of WiFi security is one that we at the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) at Europol are very concerned about,” Europol’s EC3 head Troels Oerting said in a statement, as posted by CNET.

“We wholeheartedly support activities which shine light on this everyday risk consumers face.”

Security adviser Sean Sullivan, who participated in the experiment, recommends that people take a closer look at the Terms and Conditions page of a public Wi-Fi hotspot. There are inherent risks that comes with wireless communication and a VPN is useful in securing such type of exchange.