13 WTHR - Indianapolis News |Police on the lookout for cyber crimes

Police on the lookout for cyber crimes

Rich Van Wyk/Eyewitness News

Indianapolis, Feb. 20 - Hamilton County sheriff's deputies accustomed to looking for burglars and speeders are now being trained to spot roving cyber thieves, so called war drivers.

They roam neighborhoods with laptop computers searching for unsecured home computers and Internet connections.

Hamilton County Sheriff's Captain Jim Jowitt believes, "they are a potential huge financial threat."

Eyewitness News showed you how many homeowners don't bother installing the security features on their home computer wireless networks. How easy it is to hijack Internet connections or rummage through personal computers.

Accessing someone's computer system without their permission, under Indiana law, is trespassing.

"And that is just accessing. If you do things with the information there can be other crimes involved. We are going to take this seriously."

In Greenwood, police say they are just as serious about enforcing the computer trespassing law. Detective Eric Klinkowski adds, "We know several businesses that were targeted and denoted on war chalking web sites."

War drivers use something as simple as chalk or as sophisticated as satellite global positioning systems to mark businesses with open wireless computer systems so other war drivers can find them.

They even put a so-called wireless hot spot on the Internet.

Klinkowski, who investigates crimes committed using computers, can't understand why people who lock their doors would leave their computers open to anyone. "It's just a matter of time before we have to investigate one of these things."

Neither police department has arrested anyone for computer trespassing. However in Hamilton County, in two separate financial fraud cases, the suspect either admitted or had the equipment necessary to commit crimes using someone else's wireless computer system.