In a technique which hackers call 'wardriving' - driving around sniffing the airwaves for insecure access points - the Queensland police are reported to be meeting with some success.

According to Detective Superintendent Brian Hay of the Queensland police - speaking with SecurityProNews, a down-under IT security newswire - the procedure is both easy and productive.

"We know unsecured networks are a problem," he said. "We know the crooks are out there driving around trying to identify these networks. We can't just sit back and not address the issue."

DS Hay added that the aim of the information security campaign is to tell people about the insecurity of their WiFi access point - "Excuse me, this could happen to you and your family and this is how you can rectify it," he said.

This isn't the first time that Australian police have been pro-active in dealing with WiFi access point insecurity, Infosecurity notes.

Almost exactly a year ago, police in Victoria reported several incidents of householders in the state being hit by large file downloads by unknown hackers.

In Australia, all-you-can-use internet broadband deals are rare, so ISPs tend to charge for customer's usage, which means that users who leave their access points unsecured are not just risking hacker accesses, but could also end up with a large bill as well.