I did a quick search on this and didn't see anything so I'm hoping that I'm not duplicating anything.
I'm netadmin for my company, but not extremely familiar with wireless networking.
We recently ordered new laptops for two of our field techs. The laptops came with wifi capable cards (Dell TrueMobile 1300 WLAN).
I've disabled the cards in the system BIOS to prevent the field techs from using them. I'm not sure exactly what the real reason is behind this (my boss requested that I do it), but I've been asked to come up with the cons of having a wireless card enabled on a machine in the event that one of the techs discovers that they have the cards (the BIOS prevents them from making changes without a password, but still allows them to see that there is a card there!) and goes to his boss to complain. Hope that's not too confusing...
At this point, I've never really thought about this, but it's become very interesting. What sort of security issues would present themselves if a card was enabled on a machine with the default settings? I've done a wee bit of research and really can only think of the fact that the machine would basically log onto any wifi network without encryption enabled that served it an address and leave the user of the laptop liable for damages.
Our field techs aren't the most knowledgeable fellas, a bit shady and of the blood that they know everything and can do no wrong. There's politic here, but I'm really interested in the technical side of it