"This is not a unique thing," he said. "It's anecdotal, and it's funny, but it's not a unique situation."

Joe Hurd, networking manager at Energen Corp. in Birmingham, Ala., can attest to that. He said the natural gas utility and exploration company made some of the same mistakes when it installed an EVDO-based cellular data network to serve a remote location in New Mexico.

"We kinda did some of that," Hurd said. "We just stuck it out there."

Hurd said he was attending the conference to learn how to improve security for the cellular network and a Wi-Fi network being rolled out in headquarters. "The thing I'm concerned about is the policy" covering acceptable usage of the network, he said.

Although Energen will use intrusion-detection and other antihacking measures, hackers aren't Hurd's main worry. "Hacking is what you hear about mostly, but we have tools for that," he said.