How Dangerous is Wireless to non-Hacker Shadowrunners Options

[BlackJaw]

A lot of arguments on this board bring up the idea that no sane non-civilian would ever have their wifi on because they might be hacked. It most frequently comes up when talking about street sams on a mission into a secure facility, but it's come up when talking about 2075 military forces, augmented sports player (combat biking and urban brawl players are certainly augmented). For the purposes of this argument, let's stick with Street Sams as part of a Runner Team on a mission.

We'll go ahead set this up a reasonable street sam that is taking precautions to protect his wireless. A good R6 commlink owned by the Hacker, a Wrapper program to conceal device types a bit, and even a box of Stealth RFID to toss out if he get worried.

If I'm a Street Sam (something like the Archetype on page 112,) and I have most of my gear's wireless off, because it's a run and that's what smart people do, which is to say that's what the team's hacker told me to do. However, there is a handful of gear my street sam will want his bonus from, including Smartguns. So I slave those to a Rating 6 commlink owned by the team Decker. Let's say the decker is like the one on page 121. I also have a Wrapper program running on a tiny Bug-Drone, so all my wireless gear shows up in the matrix looks benign. Lastly, I've got a small Altoids sized tin, coated in wireless blocking paint, full of stealth RFID tags which I spread all over the place if I decide to really mess with a spider.

This is a basic run, nothing too extreme or easy. We're breaking into a corp facility after hours to steal a small non-military drone prototype. The facility has decent security, including a Host system, some on-sight security guards (rating 2 NPCs, page 382), security drones, and an on-call remote spider (Rating 5 Elite Corp Security LT on page 384).

Keeping in mind that radio signal scanners either spots & tracks an icon or not (they can't look for the number of hidden hidden icons or get details on icons they have spotted such as verifying their icon,) that Security Guards aren't very good at matrix actions (security guard NPCs on page 382 lack the computer skill), that the Spider isn't within 100m of the facility, and is probably in the host system not on the local grid if present at all (let's assume he is,) and that Drones do not have a persona and therefore can't take matrix actions at all, in how much danger is the street sam from being hacked? What happens when combat breaks out and security suddenly knows he's there?

The most immediate question that comes to my mind is who exactly is hacking the street sam? The Spider could do it, but he'd have to leave his Host to try, and that's something the Shadowrun team's decker would love. Even if he comes out of the Host, he's not a member of GOD, even if he's a member of the same AAA corp and this is all happening on their site. Moreover, the street sam is on the local or public grid. If the Spider comes out of the host and starts hacking the street sam, he's going to start getting generating OS and might get converged on. (You really don't think a massive souless corp will let even their own people hack at will? I don't think they trust their own people that much. A spider can do what he needs in his own division's host, but I bet he's not allowed to just doing things anywhere in the matrix because he's not part of the corp's subset of GOD.

Assuming the Spider does come out of his Web Host to hack the street sam, can he really brick the sam's smartlink enabled cybereyes before the sam has time to turn the wireless off? IE: can he do it in a single action?