Welcome to the era of drive-by hacking. ‘BBC News Online has been shown just how lax security is on wireless networks used in London’s financial centre.

On one short trip, two-thirds of the networks we discovered using a laptop and free software tools were found to be wide open.

Any maliciously minded hacker could easily join these networks and piggy back on their fast net links, steal documents or subvert other machines on the systems to do their bidding.’