A man who hacked into his neighbor's Wi-Fi router and launched a vindictive campaign of terror has been sentenced to 18 years in prison for his crimes. The two-year episode was perpetuated by Barry Ardolf, a 46-year-old father of two, against Matt and Bethany Kostolnik of Blaine, Minn., soon after they moved in next door. It includes framing his neighbor for child pornography, multiple threats sent using the victim's email to government officials and also suggestive email messages to superiors and colleagues at a local law office. 

Ardolf was only caught after an inquiry by Kostolnik's superior resulted in the installation of a packet sniffer that eventually led to Ardolf--but not before the Secret Service showed up at Kostolnik's office to ask about threatening emails sent from his IP address. At the heart of the matter was the WEP security that was configured on Kostolnik's Wi-Fi router. Ardolf apparently read up on cracking WEP, taking about two weeks to identify his victims' router out of those in the neighborhood and then launching a series of attacks to break its encryption password.

While it's a widely known fact that it's easy to break into WEP, some businesses may continue using it because of legacy equipment. These companies are well-advised to replace their older Wi-Fi hardware with support for WPA or WPA2 encryption.

For more:
- check out this article at Network World
- check out this article at Time

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