On a hot summer's day two years ago, members of the Washington police force arrived at a building in Arlington County to arrest a suspected paedophile. The detectives were met by an elderly woman who, it emerged, had nothing to do with the crime. The problem was her wireless router. The device was openly allowing access to the internet throughout her apartment building and it is suspected that one of her neighbours was using it to upload child pornography.

This is apparently a typical picture; the IT security consultant, Network Box, estimates that 13% of all home networks and 16% of business networks are unsecured. With 30m routers sold worldwide last year alone, that's a lot of access points capable of being exploited.

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