This is an Identity Theft example where a wireless hacker gains access to all your online accounts when you read your email over a wireless network.

Before you read any further, note that Wireless Personal Secure (Wifi Security Guy’s wireless security service) completely protects you and if you were using it the following would not happen to you. Click here to get this amazing protection or to learn more about it.

Setting: you use a wireless network (with or without a password) and check your email.

1. If this network has a password on it, the hacker has already used kismet/airsnort/aircrack to break it. More than likely this network doesn’t have a password on it - over 80% of them don’t.
2. Using kismet the hacker watchs you check your email. Kismet records every packet you send on the network.
3. Kismet records the email server you connected to, and the login name and password you used to get your email.
4. The hacker lets Kismet collect wifi packets for several hours, usually during the peak times this wifi network is in use. If this is a nearby hotel the hacker collects packets through the evening, if it’s a cafe or sandwich shop the hacker collects packets during lunch.
5. The hacker goes back home and runs dsniff on the capture files that kismet created. Dsniff dumps out all the servers and name/password combinations that kismet collected that day.
6. The hacker gets your server and login name/password and sets up his email client to now download all your email into a special folder. You are completely unaware he’s doing any of this.
7. The hacker monitors your email for several weeks, taking note of all the emails you get from online stores. The hacker compiles a list of all the stores that send you emails.
8. After several weeks of silently collecting your emails and making a list of where you have shopped the hacker is now ready to strike.
9. The hacker goes to each of your stores and has your password reset. To do this all he has to do is enter your email address and click “forgot password”. The online stores quickly oblige him by sending a new password to your email, which the hacker is receiving. The hacker takes not of each of the new passwords and quickly deletes those emails from you email server so you never see them.
10. The hacker then returns to each of the stores with the new passwords and places orders.
11. The hacker has the items sent to a different address, usually an apartment complex where UPS/FedEx just knock on the door and drop the package off.
12. One thing about online stores these days. They don’t charge your card until the merchandise is ready to ship. The hacker will have the packages overnighted (why not, it’s not his money…) which means your card is charged and he receives the goods the very next day.
13. Most people will never be aware they’ve even been charged until it’s too late - the hacker has long picked up the packages and can’t be caught.

Take note, all it took was the hacker gaining access to one thing (your email in this example). That’s how hackers work, they only need access to one thing, and from that they figure out how to gain access to other things. Another thing to note. The hacker never had to know your credit card numbers.

There are more complicated examples than this one, but this is certainly one of the easiest to understand.

Remember, everything you do on a wireless network can be seen by anyone else in the area, all it takes is one person deciding to record your activity and you can fall victim to identity theft very easily.

Kismet is one of an Identity Theft hacker’s favorite tools. In this article we explore how kismet works and why the hackers like it so much.

Before you read any further, note that Wireless Personal Secure (Wifi Security Guy’s wireless security service) completely protects you and if you were using it kismet would only record completely encrypted, uncrackable data - all of your information would be 100% safe. Click here to get this amazing protection or to learn more about it.

Kismet is a powerful tool that collects and analyzes information on all the wireless networks within range of the computer running kismet. We’ll familiarize ourselves with kismet’s basic functions first and then dig into exactly how wireless hackers use it to help them commit Identity Theft. It has two basic functions that hackers use it for (1) examining the wireless network and (2) recording all the network activity to run other hacking tools on.

Kismet is freely downloaded from the Internet and installs in minutes. It has a real simple configuration file where the hacker tells kismet which wireless network card (or cards) to use and which wireless channels he wants kismet to pay attention to.

1. Examining The Wireless Network

After kismet starts the hacker sees this screen:

This screen is split into the following sections:

1. Info

The Info section list a summary of everything kismet has collected or seen so far. In this snapshot we see:

• kismet has found 14 Networks
• kismet has recorded 252,331 wireless network packets
• of those 252,331 packets only 24 of them were encrypted
• 0 (none) of the encrypted packets were found to be “weak” (vulnerable to quick or easy hacking)
• 185 packets were “noisy” (hard to picked up because of some form of interference)
• 185 packets were discarded as unusable (the same “noisy” packets)
• on average kismet is collecting 152 packets per second
• at the bottom of the “Info” section (displayed in the full-screen image above) you can see kismet is using the ipw220 network card, is currently listening on channel 11, and has been recording packets for 45 minutes and 20 seconds.

2. Status

The status section lists recent events (in this case it’s letting us know there are some other wireless devices that are checking out the networks (”probing”), but it’s never actually joining one of those networks. That’s very suspicious activity, it may be a hacker who is watching the wireless networks to see what he can pick up. It also let’s us know that the Battery is charging and is up to 94% charged. This is handy for a hacker because he usually is not plugged in with a power cord when he’s collecting information, and he’ll need to keep an eye on his battery levels

3. Networks (now to the juicy stuff)

Let’s look at each of these columns and see what they are for.

Name - This is the name of the network. The first network listed is “Adhoc” which just means devices/laptops that aren’t actually a part of any particular network but are available to connect with other computers without joining a specific network. 467 adhoc packets seems a little high to me. This is usually because there are computers in the area that are “open” to connecting with other computers directly, but isn’t setup to use any of the wireless networks. Adhoc networks don’t have a central wireless access point, sometimes two people with laptops may create their own adhoc network just so they can share some files or some similar activity when there’s no access point around that they can join.

The “Probe” networks is showing what networks computers were trying to find. A common “security” step taken by people who have been misinformed is they “hide” their SSID (also known as turning off the broadcast of their SSID/ESSID). If you have been on a “hidden” network your computer can’t tell if that network is around or not because normal wireless networks broadcast a “hey I’m here and my name is XYZ” message, but a “hidden” network doesn’t. So your computer will broadcast a message that says “hey, I’m looking for network XYZ, are you around?” Those messages show up as “Probe networks”. You can read more on how hiding a network doesn’t really hide it in our article on Identity Theft And A False Sense Of Security - Wifi “security” measures that don’t secure your information, there’s a lot of misinformation floating around causing people to think they are secured when they really aren’t

The “<no ssid>” network is raw wireless traffic that was transmitted without being associated on any wireless network, a lot like talking to yourself out loud. Notice there are only 33 packets like this after 45 minutes of collecting information. Hackers usually just ignore “<no ssid>”

All the rest of the names you see in the list are “real” wireless networks.

T - Type of device. There are two basic types that show up here, G - gateway and A - access point. The difference between the two is very subtle and depending on who you ask you will get differing (and sometimes conflicting) answers. For a hacker the type is not that important. Notice that all “real” networks are all listed as A.

W - it use to stand for “WEP”, now it’s just an indicator of what type of encryption a wireless network is using (if any). N - none (or “no”), Y - “Yes” but unknown or varied (notice the Y is only on the <no ssid> network, O - “other”, sometimes the same as “N”.

Ch - Channel, what channel this network operates on. Because wireless networks can be close together it’s important to use different channels for nearby networks so they don’t run up a lot of interference. Notice these are almost exclusively on channel 11, a big mistake on the part of the people that planned the networks out. If you have networks that are near yours and yours just doesn’t seem to run as fast as you think it should, kismet can tell you which channels are in use by which networks so you can move your network to an “empty” channel.

Hackers also use the channel to narrow in on just one network. Ordinarily kismet hops from one channel to another listening and gathering information. While it’s on one channel it can’t be collecting information on any other channel. So once a hacker finds a network he wasn’t to really listen to, he tells kismet to only listen on that particular channel.

Packets - Whenever your computer sends or receives anything with the wireless network it does it in “packets” or small chunks of information. A high packet count is an indication of a very active network. You can see that Panera is the most active of them all.

Flags - There is a decent list of flags that can appear here, the flag hackers love to see is the “F”, which means “Factory Defaults”, in other words whoever setup the wireless network just took the wireless router out of the box, plugged it in, and then forgot all about it. That allows the hacker to login to the router (all manufacturers have a set of name/passwords that their wireless routers come with right out of the box) and change anything he would want. The “U” you see for Panera means kismet was able to figure out the range of addresses that are used on the network by examining the UDP traffic (a trivial point and you can forget it just as soon as you leave this sentence).

IP Range - This is the address range that can be used by a hacker if he wants to join the wireless network even without the permission of the wireless router. Once the hacker knows what address range is in use he can just take one of the unused IPs.

Size - This it the total amount of data that is sent on the wireless router. In this case Panera has been busy for the past 45 minutes and has transmitted 22 megabytes. Along with Packets, the Size tells how active a particular wireless network is.

If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m sitting at Panera Bread, a local wifi & sandwich shop here in Bowling Green. It’s lunchtime and it’s moderately busy. I look around and see no more than 10 laptops running at a time. Most people aren’t using public wifi to download large files, most of their traffic is going to be their email and visiting websites. With 22Meg of email and website visits we should see a decent number of logins that hackers would use for Identity Theft (and we do!).

As you can see, kismet is great for giving a hacker a quick overview of all the wireless activity going on in the area. Since Panera has the most activity, a hacker will use kismet to see more detailed information about this particular network. When he selects the Panera network and hits ‘c’ to see the client list of that network, this is what he would see:

Here’s a closeup:

Let’s review these columns:

T - type, S is the “station” or the wireless router, T are the clients (technically ‘T’ here stands for ‘To-DS’ or ‘this client has transmitted to the distribution system’, in other words this client has transmitted on the wireless network).

MAC - Media Access Control. This is the “physical address” of each of the machines on the wireless network. Another misnomer floating around is that by locking your wireless network down by MAC address (only allowing the MACs of your laptops on the network) you will keep everyone else off. You can read more about this in our article Identity Theft And A False Sense Of Security - Wifi “security” measures that don’t secure your information, but basically a hacker can see all the MACs listed here and can easily set his own network card to use one of those MACs instead of his own and the “locked down” network is now available for his access. See the article on the false sense of security for more details.

Manuf - Manufacturer. This handy, but not necessarily important. The hacker can see who the registered manufacturer of that computer’s wireless network card is. This is determined by MAC, each manufacturer has a MAC range they can use. In the larger screen shot you can see one listed as “Apple”, that’s a Mac notebook. Interesting information but for most uses it’s not needed.

Data - This is how many packets were transmitted by this client that actually carried data (information the hacker would be interested in). At the top of the list is the wireless router, every computer sends information through the router and in turn everything that is sent to the computers comes through the router, so it will always have the most data packets. A hacker can use this to tell which clients are the most active on the network.

Crypt - This is the number of encrypted packets sent by this computer. As you can see, this is an “open” or unencrypted network so none of the data is encrypted.

Size - This is the amount of data transmitted in bytes. This is another indicator, used with the Data column, that tells the hacker which clients are the most active on the network.

IP Range - This is the IP address of this computer on this network. A hacker can use this IP address to narrow down his list of computers he wants to target with other tools. Also, if MAC filtering is turned on and the hacker is going to join the network by setting his own MAC to be the same as one of these clients, he’ll also manually set his IP address to the same addressed used by the machine with that MAC address.

Sgn and Nse tell how strong the signal and noise is from this particular client, as you can see it’s not set and really not needed.

2. Recording Network Activity

The kismet configuration file tells kismet where to save all the network activity. Anytime kismet runs it automatically records all the network activity. This is an important point for a hacker, he doesn’t have to run any of his other hacking tools while he’s out collecting information - all the tools he will use can use the files kismet saves the network activity in. This means a hacker can go setup in (or near) a local cafe/hotel/business/etc and just let his laptop run. He can read a book, eat, etc and his laptop is busy collecting all the information he’ll use later to break into the wireless network.

In the case of a unencrypted network he’ll just go home and run some of his tools (like dsniff). If the network is encrypted kismet will still record all the encrypted packets. At home the hacker uses tools like the aircrack family to break the encryption and then runs tools like dsniff after that on the unecrypted data.

The point is with kismet recording the hacker can go back home and take all the time he needs in order to break into the wireless network without actually being at the location. And after he’s broken the network at home everything he’s recorded is now available for his examination, and he can come back to the location later and since he now has the encryption keys he can immediately access everything on that network from that point forward.

This article addresses a number of so-called security measures that “experts” say will help secure your wireless network from illegal access and Identity Theft. We list why these security measures don’t work and what you should really be doing to secure your wireless networks.

Before you read any further, note that Wireless Personal Secure (Wifi Security Guy’s wireless security service) completely protects you and if you were using it you wouldn’t have to worry about any of the following “security measures” (although you could do them if you wanted - even though as you’ll see, they don’t work). Click here to get this amazing protection or to learn more about it.

With Identity Theft being the fastest growing crime (according to the FBI), the growth of Identity Theft by wireless networks (millions reported in the past few years), and the ubiquity of wireless networking, there’s a lot of mis-information floating around out there where so-called “experts” give advice on how to secure wireless networks. A lot of the advice gives only a false-sense of security and since the average wifi user is not technically proficient enough to know what advice works and what doesn’t, we list the gambit of advice here, tell you if it doesn’t work (and why), and what action you should take in each case.

1. Change the default SSID.

The SSID (Service Set Identifier) gives the name of a particular wireless network. When someone comes over to your house and is going to use your wireless network you tell them the name (SSID) of the network and the password (I hope you have a password on it!!).

Every wireless access points come with a “factory default” SSID, usually the name of the manufacturer (LINKSYS, NETGEAR, D-LINK, etc), and it is good advice to change the SSID, but it doesn’t increase your security at all. Wireless networks with SSIDs that you generate are just as easy to break into as the SSIDs that came on the wireless access point from the factory.

Action: Change your SSID to something that’s more appropriate, but don’t think that changing the SSID adds any security to your network. Don’t change the SSID to your name, your address, your phone number, etc. - The problem with doing that is you let any passerby know exactly which wireless network they see in their scan is yours.

Additional Note: This measure wouldn’t protect you from Identity Theft on your wireless network. You need the protection of a service like our Wireless Personal Secure.

2. Setting up MAC filtering.

Every network device (access point, laptop, computer, etc) has a MAC address (Media Access Control address). Without diving down into a lot of network theory, let me just say that your MAC address is hard coded into your computer’s wireless card. When you are using your home network you may have one IP address, and when you go to your local cafe you will more than likely get a different IP address. But your MAC never changed - it uniquely identifies you on the wireless network, no matter where you go.

MAC filtering is where you configure your wireless router to only allow certain MACs on the network, and it ignores all the rest. At first this may seem like a really good idea - a hacker driving by can’t use your network now, right? WRONG!

A hacker driving by will be using a sniffer tool like kismet, and kismet will tell the hacker all the MAC addresses in use on your wireless network (read the article to learn how). The hacker then sets his network card to use your MAC instead of the MAC that came on it. From that point forward your wireless router can’t tell the difference between your computer and the hacker’s computer.

MAC filtering is easily bypassed by a hacker. Additionally, every time a friend comes over who wants to legitimately use your wireless network you have to add their MAC to your filter list. It’s just not worth your time.

Action: None, MAC filtering adds no benefit to securing your network, it just adds an administrative burden to you every time a visitor drops by.

Additional Note: This measure wouldn’t protect you from Identity Theft on your wireless network. You need the protection of a service like our Wireless Personal Secure.

3. Disable SSID broadcast.

Wireless routers ordinarily broadcast their SSID (name) every few seconds. Your computer uses that broadcast to know which wireless networks are in the area and join them (if you’ve configured that wireless network in the past, usually your computer will automatically join that network when it sees it). When you turn off the SSID broadcast your wireless router will not announce the network every few seconds. Now every time you want to connect to that wireless network, since it’s hidden, your computer won’t automatically connect to it. Instead you have to manually tell it “connect to my wireless network”. When you do that your computer broadcasts a message like “hey, is network XYZ around here?” The wireless router then says “yes, I’m here” and your computer then joins the network.

I hope you saw the flaw(s). A minor flaw is that you have to manually join the network any time you want to use it. A major flaw is the SSID is broadcast anyway, every time your computer goes to join. All a hacker has to do is wait around for your computer to join the network to pick up the SSID, then he can join the network too. And there are ways that he can “jam” your network so your computer “drops off” of the wireless network, then when you rejoin within a few minutes he’ll see the SSID. He bascially “forced” you into telling him the SSID.

Action: None. Not broadcasting the SSID only complicates your use of the wireless network without adding any security.

Additional Note: This measure wouldn’t protect you from Identity Theft on your wireless network. You need the protection of a service like our Wireless Personal Secure.

4. Hard-code IP addresses instead of using DHCP.

DHCP stands for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. It’s a network administrator’s dream, and sometimes also their nightmare. Basically every computer on the network has to have an IP address. In the “old” days (pre DHCP) an administrator had to manually assign every computer on the network an IP address and make sure that none of the IP addresses overlapped (two computers with the same address). Most computers can’t handle having the same IP address that another computer has (more on this in a bit).

DHCP allows a computer to “ask” the network for an IP address whenever it connects. So when a computer joins the network it “asks” “hey, I’m new around here, can I get an IP address?” A DHCP server then says back “yes, you can have this IP: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX”. This saves the network administrator the irritation of having to assign IPs to every computer, the DHCP server does it for him.

By turning off DHCP, the computers all have to be manually configured with different IP addresses. The idea behind turning off DHCP on a wireless network is that a hacker’s computer that connects to the network now won’t be automatically given an IP and then “can’t access the network”.

A hacker’s approach to this “problem” is to do similar to the MAC address hack. He just watches the network, sees what IPs are in use and then assigns himself one manually. If he uses a new IP but still can’t use the wireless network, he can assume it’s because the router also blocks any IPs that aren’t in it’s list, just like the MAC filtering. So he can do the same as he did for the MAC filtering hack, he just assigns the same MAC and IP of a computer that is on the network to his own computer. He can also setup his computer to not have a problem with there being another computer on the network with the same IP and now the network is wide-open to him.

Action: None. Turning off DHCP and doing IP filtering is just going to give you a headache every time a friend comes over, you have to walk him through all the steps of manually configuring his own IP as well as set up your router to now allow that IP to access the network. And all that trouble for a hacker to just side-step this “security” measure just isn’t worth it.

Additional Note: This measure wouldn’t protect you from Identity Theft on your wireless network. You need the protection of a service like our Wireless Personal Secure.

5. WEP Encryption.

OK, this and WPA encryption are going to be the biggies. Everybody just assumes “oh, they work, they’ll secure me.” Bad news - the final analysis is they don’t ensure your security. WEP stands for Wired Equivalent Privacy - it’s name means “WEP is just as secured as using a wired network”. But don’t believe it’s name, it’s far from being as secured as a wired network.

I’m not going to get into all the complexities of explaining how WEP is insecure. Let me summarize with a layman’s-terms approach to WEP. With WEP you basically have a pre-shared key that everyone on the network uses. Whenever data is going to be sent on the wireless network the computer will take this pre-shared key and an IV (Initialization Vector) and use them to encrypt the data. The IV is basically an “offset” that tells which part of the pre-shared key is going to be used. The IV is constantly changed with every packet - the down side is the IV is sent along with the data! There are only 16 million possible IVs, once they are used up they begin to repeat. Once a hacker has enough IVs (either duplicates or “weak” IVs the pre-shared key can be “cryptographically calculated” in a matter of seconds. A busy network using WEP can be broken into within a matter of minutes.

Action: Turn on WEP if that’s all you have, better yet if that’s all you have - upgrade your router.

Additional Note: Since WEP doesn’t protect you from Identity Theft on your wireless network, you need the protection of a service like our Wireless Personal Secure.

6. WPA Encryption.

WPA (Wifi Protected Access) was created to answer the vulnerabilities in WEP. I’ll try to keep this as simple as possible, suffice it to say WPA has some strengths over WEP but in the end can still be broken and shouldn’t be trusted alone.

The full standard couldn’t be implemented with older network cards, and in their “rush” to secure wireless WPA was released without implementing all the security methods. WPA2 is the full implementation of the official WPA standard (802.11i). For the purposes of this article WPA will refer to both WPA and WPA2 from this point forward, we don’t want to muddy the waters with always pointing out their differences and we don’t think for the high-level view of WPA security it’s necessary.

WPA basically starts out as WEP with a larger pre-shared key and a larger IV. There are some other low-level differences between WEP and WPA, and they added EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol) which allows different manufacturers and cryptography companies to add their own authentication methods to WPA. The problem the general public has with EAP is it takes an additional EAP server to secure the network, so the general public ends up using “standard” WPA.

WPA also suffers from one other weakness that WEP doesn’t have. When the router receives two packets that don’t pass integrity checks (like a hacker just blasting out packets that obviously don’t have the right pre-shared key). This is significant because it (a) causes the wireless router to shut the network down while it “resets” and (b) causes every client to re-join the wireless network. The weakest point of the WPA usage is when clients are connecting. This means a hacker can force a WPA network to continue sending the weakest packets until he’s able to break it.

Action: Use WPA2, and if possible invest in a more secured EAP-based solution.

Additional Note: Since WPA2 can be broken and leaves you vulnerable to Identity Theft on your wireless network, you need the protection of a service like our Wireless Personal Secure.

Hey, have some other security “advice” you’ve been given? Want to run it by the real experts and see if it’s good or not? Drop me a line and we’ll add it to this article!

Identity Theft hackers love the dsniff tool. It automatically extracts login details, like names and passwords, for all the accounts being accessed on a wireless network. This article shows how hackers use it to get your information, what type of information they get, and what they can do with it.

Before you read any further, note that Wireless Personal Secure (Wifi Security Guy’s wireless security service) completely protects you and if you were using it the following would not happen to you. Click here to get this amazing protection or to learn more about it.

Dsniff can be ran in two different modes, “live” mode where it extracts names and passwords from an active wireless network, or “delayed” mode where it extracts names and passwords from a file that has all the network activity saved in it. This allows a hacker to use a tool like kismet to “passively” capture all the network activity and later extract all the login names and passwords when they go back home. It also lets a hacker record the activity of a “secured” network and crack the security at home, then extract all the login names and passwords that passed over the “secured” network. We will show how it’s used in “delayed” mode, it’s the easiest and most convenient use for a hacker.

When kismet runs, it records everything sent or received over a wireless network in a “dump” file. In our example we have a file named ‘Kismet-Apr-15-2008-2.dump’. This particular file was collected from a local sandwich shop during lunch. Let’s see what dsniff can pull out of this file:

Please notice we’ve smudged out all the login information. All in all there were 24 login names and passwords obtained in the course of that lunchtime. A hacker’s feast! In this little screen shot you can see a lot of pop logins captured. Pop (aka POP3) stands for “Post Office Protocol”, this is people logging in to read their email. You can read how once a hacker has access to your email (as now anyone who would have used kismet and dsniff as I did) he can now commit Identity Theft against you at our article: Wireless Network Identity Theft Example (technical).

As you can see the three most important pieces of information are displayed: (1) the server connected to, (2) the username on the email account, and (3) the password on that account. With those three pieces of information a hacker can now monitor all of these accounts and commit Identity Theft against them within just a few weeks.

There wasn’t enough screen space to show everything captured, so I’ve done another small screen shot so you can see other examples of the information captured:

The first entry (starting with “GET /sas/LoginSubmit”) is a web browser that is opening a “secured” page. Notice dsniff pulls out the Account ID, Username, and Password (look on that same line and you’ll see the entries, I’ve smudged out the user name and password to protect the user).

The second entry is a vulnerable snmp server. It’s a little complicated (and beyond the scope of this article), but with an unsecured snmp server around a hacker can break into the system and use it to exploit more users and gain more information.

So as you can see dsniff is a powerful tool that extracts login information on a wireless network (or file with all the network activity saved in it). The login information contains all the names, passwords, and which servers those names and passwords work on. The hacker then uses this information to commit Identity Theft. How a hacker can use this information to commit Identity Theft is covered in this article: Wireless Network Identity Theft Example (technical).

This

Here’s the radio ad everyone’s talking about:

Here’s the ad in text form:

YOU JUST SENT E-MAIL, BROWSED THE WEB AND DID SOME SHOPPING. A TYPICAL DAY ON YOUR P-C, RIGHT? YOU MAY ALSO HAVE JUST BEEN THE VICTIM, OF CYBER THEFT! HACKERS CAN NOW DOWNLOAD FREE SOFTWARE ENABLING THEM TO ACCESS YOUR SECRET PASSWORDS FOR ONLINE SHOPPING AND SUCH THINGS AND BEFORE YOU REALIZE IT, AND CAN DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT, THEY’VE GONE ON THE BIGGEST SHOPPING SPREE EVER WITHOUT GETTING CAUGHT…AND ALL THE SOFTWARE PROTECTION YOU’VE INSTALLED ON YOUR COMPUTER….IS USELESS. BECAUSE FIREWALL AND VIRUS SOFTWARE ONLY OFFER INTERNAL PROTECTION. THEY DON’T PROTECT INFORMATION GOING OUT OF YOUR COMPUTER. THERE IS SOMEONE, THOUGH, WHO CAN HELP! THE WI-FI SECURITY GUY! HE CAN PROTECT YOUR COMPUTER WITH THE SAME SECURITY MEASURES USED BY BANKS AND OUR MILITARY AND IT ONLY COSTS 50-CENTS A DAY. ISN’T PROTECTING YOUR IDENTITY WORTH THAT MUCH? LEARN MORE AT WI-FI SECURITY GUY DOT COM. W-I-F-I SECURITY GUY DOT COM.

You’ve seen in your affiliate back-office the main link in the top right corner that you can use to send anyone to the main page of the site and you get credited with the referral. How would you like to send people to any page on the site and still get the credit? This how-to will show you how.

First, navigate to the page you want to send people to and copy the URL, we’ll use the radio-ad #1 in this example:

Then login to your affiliate back-office and click “Build & Track Your Own Links”:

That brings you to this form:

Paste the URL into the field labeled “Define Your Own“, give the URL a name that will mean something to you in the “Tracking Keyword” field, (I put “radio”), and click “Create New Link“.

The new link will appear with some statistics (more on that in a second):

You can now copy and paste that link in an email, or use it as the URL in an ad you create. Whenever people go to that link they are “marked” as an account for you. If they sign up you’ll get the monthly commission! The cool thing is they are sent to the page you browsed to, so you can now send anyone to any page on the site by creating a special URL for that page.

Now, a little on those other fields there:

• Unique Hits - number of different people who have clicked on that URL. If you send it to 50 people in an email this will tell you the number of people who clicked on it from that email.
• Sales - the number of people who came in through that link and then purchased the service. This could even be that they come to the site on this link this month and sign up next month, so don’t get discouraged if they don’t immediately purchase!
• Conversion Rate - the number of people that purchase compared to the number that came to the site on that URL. The higher this number is, the more successful that page is at converting people into paying customers.

Now to email it out, remember, don’t make a real long-winded email. You’re not trying to sell them the whole ball of wax in one email, just a short email with the link to get them interested. It may take several emails before they decide to purchase. If you spread them out about once a week or so you’ll be doing good.

Here’s an example email of the radio link:

Hello everyone.

Just dropping you a quick note. You’ve probably already heard about this radio ad, but just in case you’ve missed it I wanted to make sure you get it. You can listen to the ad on this page:

<put the radio link you create here>

And of course for more information, go here:

<put your main link that’s in the top-right of your affiliate back-office here>

Ready to get your free account and make an income that grows from one month to the next with every friend you refer to our Security Service? This How-to shows you step-by-step how to get started.

1. Go to the Affiliate Signup Page.

2. Fill in the form. If you like being paid quick, select to be paid by Paypal. With Paypal we can instantly transfer your money into your Paypal account. With Paypal you can even have a Debit card that works just like a Mastercard to pay bills, go shopping, whatever you want to do. And if you make a purchase using the Debit card for more than what you have on the card it will just pull the remaining amount from your bank account - It completely replaces the debit card you have been using with your bank. All this with no fees! Click here to learn more about Paypal’s Debit card program. We don’t make any money by you using a Paypal account to receive payment, we just recommend it because of the speed of getting your money into your hands.

If you chose, we can mail you a paper check, but be prepared to wait on the mail, and then wait while your bank clears the funds into your account.

3. Now that you have your affiliate account, start promoting yourself by following the steps in the Affiliate Action List!

Whether you’re an old affiliate or just started, this document is the starting point for any action you’ll take as an affiliate.

1. First Things First

If you’re just starting, take the following actions:

1. Bookmark this page. Anytime you’re wondering what to do next, remember, this page is your roadmap. It will have all the instructions necessary for you to become a successful affiliate

start at the top and work your way down as you gain more experience with the affiliate system. And remember, any time you’re wondering what to do next, come back to this page

Whether you’re an old affiliate or just started, this document is the starting point for any action you’ll take as an affiliate.

1. First Things First

If you’re just starting, take the following two actions:

1. Bookmark this page. Anytime you’re wondering what to do next or looking for new afilate ideas, remember, this page is your road map. It will have all the instructions necessary for you to become a successful affiliate.
2. Subscribe to this article. Scroll down to the bottom of this page and click “subscribe” and fill out your information. That will keep you notified of any updates or changes that are made to this page. This is important because as we get feedback from affiliates on what works well and what under-performs we will be passing that information on to you right here on this page. We want you to succeed so we’re always going to keep you informed.
3. Memorize your affiliate number. Your affiliate number is how the site knows who you send to it as compared to anyone else that just happens to come to the site. If you send someone to the site without your affiliate number and they sign up there’s no way for us to know you sent them. When you login to the affiliate area take note of the URL in the top right box labeled “Standard Linking Code”. Notice it’s the full website name (www.WifiSecurityGuy.com) with your affiliate number and “.html” added to the end. If you send that URL to people in an email and they click it the system knows you sent them and credits you for the sale when they sign up - and you get credited every month thereafter.

Now that you’ve got that out of the way, follow the rest of this page basically from top to bottom. The steps listed at the top are important learning steps for you to do first. They’ll teach you the basics of using the affiliate program and lay a foundation for more advanced things as you go along.

2. Overall Strategy.

There are two main ways you can build your list of accounts that pay you ever month. The first is by starting with inviting people you know to the website using special URLs you will create (more on that in a minute). The second is by increasing that list of people you know. The second way is the advanced way, but don’t let it scare you. Once you go through some of the simple strategies with the people you already know you’ll see how easy the second way really is. And don’t think you have to be super computer-literate to do it. Anyone with a basic knowledge of computers and the Internet can do everything listed here.

3. Make Your List.

We have to start with making a list of prospective people to send to the site. Your email address book is a good place to start. I have well over 2,000 email addresses in my address book. I got them all by never deleting any addresses, no matter how “unimportant” they were. In marketing it all comes down to numbers. The more contacts you have the greater the chances of your success. Don’t worry if you have a small address book (I admit mine is huge compared to most people’s), we have ways of expanding your list. But the first thing you have to do is create a list of people you’re going to email. As you meet more people in life, business, through friendship, etc, remember to get their email address and add them to the list. This list is going to be the key to your affiliate success.

You may want to save this list in a separate document, like by copying all the emails out to a word or text document, but this isn’t necessary. The bottom line is you need to have these addresses in one place that’s easy for you to manage. If you use your address book you may be able to sort your addresses by category, or by adding the addresses to a special “new” address book you can create, or by even creating an address “list” in your address book.

Another way to track your list is to create your own mailing list. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on mailing lists here, here’s a brief overview. A mailing list is something that “lives” on a mail server. It has a list of all of the email addresses “subscribed” to that list. Whenever you send an email to that mailing list, the server in turn copies that email out to every address in the list. If people no longer want to receive email from you, or the server has problems delivering email to certain addresses, it automatically “cleans” the list by taking those addresses off of the list. As you meet new people you go to the server and add those emails to the list and the next time you send out an email the new people will automatically receive it. It’s a simple way to track all of your email addresses, and it keeps you from having to send out hundreds of emails to all your contacts, you just send out one email to the email list address and it does all the rest. If you’re interested in your own mailing list, use the contact form and let me know so we can help you get that setup.

4. What To Email.

One thing I’ve learned in today’s fast-paced and interruption-filled world is people can’t take long advertisements. And most people will be turned off by an advertisement right away.

The best way to get people to purchase any service or product is by warming them up to it in small pieces. For example, let’s say you have a 10-minute long “ad” for a service. You can’t send that entire “ad” to them all at one time. Most people will read the first paragraph or so, realize it’s really long and they don’t have time for it now so they stop right there. Since you sent them the entire ad already you would be shooting yourself in the foot by sending the entire ad all over again. As soon as they see it’s the same ad they quit reading again. Eventually they just ignore your emails altogether.

A better approach would be to break that 10 minute ad into 20 small 30-second chunks. There are several reasons for this. The first is they don’t get the feeling they are being sold something. A small chunk can be made to look “informative” not “intrusive”. Notice by sending the long 10-minute ad above they gave it 30 seconds or so and then diverted their attention to something else. Well by sending them only 30 seconds your email probably wont be interrupted. They see the small email, it plants an idea in their mind, and they move on.

Another advantage is if they ignore one or two emails (or don’t have time to read them) they won’t miss much. If they only catch 8 minutes of your total 10 minutes of small ads they will still get enough information for them to make an informed decision about the product or service you are bringing to their attention.

The best things to put in an email are a couple sentences encouraging them to look at this article, listen to this audio, or watch this video, and a link to that content. And always ask them for their feedback or ideas. If you can get them into a conversation you’re well on your way to selling them.

Here’s an email I used to let people know about the first radio ad:

Hello everyone.

Just dropping you a quick note. You’ve probably already heard about this radio ad, but just in case you’ve missed it I wanted to make sure you get it. You can listen to the ad on this page:

link to the radio ad

And of course for more information, go here:

link to the home page

You can personalize that by putting in their first name instead of “everyone”. Notice how short it is, and how it assumes they may have already heard about it - that gives the impression that there’s a “buzz” about the ad already (and there was - putting that radio ad up on the website doubled the website activity in just one day).

Sending the user to the site is very important. The site “sells” the product for you. If they get curious they will look around and learn more about the service. If you had the radio ad in the email you send them there’s very little chance they’ll go to the site.

5. How To Create A URL.

Don’t just copy and paste URLs from the site to your email list. It’s great that you’re going to send them to the site, but unless you send them using special URLs you wont get the credit for signing them up. And with all the advertising that’s going on, and all the other affiliates already promoting the service it would be impossible for us to know you sent them to the site and not someone else, or that they didn’t hear or see a radio/TV/newspaper ad and come on their own.

So, you need to create your own special links to send them. When they come to the site using your special links the site does two things to remember them as having come from you: (1) it sets a cookie on their computer and (2) it records their IP address just in case their browser doesn’t save cookies. When they sign up for the service the site will remember them by either their cookie or their IP address (or both) and give you the credit.

Now that you know the importance of creating your own links to send in emails, you can read this step-by-step article on how to create a link to any page on the site: Creating Your Own URLs. The page even gives a sample email you would send out.

6. How Frequently To Email.

Just like sending a full 10-minute ad in one email would be over-kill, sending too many emails close together will have the same effect.

You should send one email to your list once a week. If you email more frequently you run the risk of people getting irritated by your emails, if you email less frequently you run the risk of people forgetting what you sent them last time. You want the emails to “chain” together into one “long ad” over a period of time until they realize they need to buy.

Marketing research has found that it can take up to 17 exposures to a product before people make a choice to buy. Something like the first 7-11 times a person hears a regular ad, it doesn’t even register in their mind. So be patient and just consistently send an email on a regular basis.

7. You Got A Sale!

Once they come and buy take them off your list and start a second list: “convert to affiliate”. Now that they are using the service you want to get them to recommend the service to their friends. You’ll make $1.50 for each of those recommendations, and $1 for everyone their friends recommend. The incentive for them is if they just get 3 to sign up, their service is free.

Now you work the “convert to affiliate” list of emails the same way you did your prospect list. Send an email every week with a link to another affiliate-type page (not this one). They don’t need to know what to do after they are an affiliate until after they become an affiliate. Create links to the affiliate information pages that explain how they can (a) get a free account and (b) make money, as well as the different affiliate testimonial pages as they get added.

8. Coming Soon…

• How to operate your own mailing list.
• Getting large numbers of emails for your mailing list dirt-cheap.
• Creating your own website to promote Wifi Security Guy - why you need it to become a super affiliate and how easy it is to do.
• Tips and tricks from the most successful affiliates.