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Douglas Schweitzer

The Security Sector

Many businesses still not getting the message

5 comments

IT TOPICS:Security

You would think with all the publicity surrounding wireless lately businesses would have grasped the message by now. No such luck in my neck of the woods. Armed with my wireless PDA, I found over a dozen open wireless networks as I walked around town. What surprised me was that there were far fewer open networks in residential areas, with many in the commercial zones. Anyone else seen similar results?

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I personally have a wireless

Submitted by Josh Horner on June 29, 2006 - 2:29 P.M.

I personally have a wireless network setup for myself and my roommates. I will allow my friends to come over with their laptops and connect to my WLAN, and that does not bother me at all. What does bother me is using the web-access to my wirless router and seeing many unwanted devices that had connected to my network since I last checked.

Many more people own wireless devices now then in previous years so the need to secure wireless access is a must. This was before the days I configured WEP and now keep a secure network minus the unwanted visitors.

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Unfortunately, WEP only

Submitted by Hugo Slabbert on June 29, 2006 - 10:46 P.M.

Unfortunately, WEP only keeps out honest people. Enough free tools boasting deauthentication attacks and packet injection exist to allow any somewhat-informed attacker with 15 minutes on their hands access to a WEP-protected WLAN.

Unless your router or some of your wireless clients don't support it, there's no real reason not to switch over to at least WPA-PSK (which is really even easier to manage than hex WEP keys) with a long passphrase. And sadly enough, even that is becoming easier to crack with newer tools...

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At least turn off the

Submitted by Anonymous on July 2, 2006 - 4:42 A.M.

At least turn off the broadcast/advertising of your wireless! Using non-default channels helps too!

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Corporate IT security policy

Submitted by Anonymous on June 29, 2006 - 10:43 A.M.

Corporate IT security policy prohibits me from having a wireless access point attached to our data network, a view I share as the local IT Manager. A potential wireless security breach is too big a risk to contemplate exposing our proprietary data to outsiders. However, with a special waiver from Corporate, I could provide a wireless access point, strictly for visitors' Internet access, which would be attached outside our firewall - no internal network exposure.

Even if I were to implement such a WLAN, I would certainly secure the access point to prevent illegal and unwanted traffic on our WAN connection by drive-by thieves, pornographers, and freeloaders. Our flex-T1 traffic volume might skyrocket as connection moochers discovered and used an open wireless connection, resulting in higher WAN service fees for our company. And, whether you're aware of that traffic or its content or not, if you own the WAN connection, you're responsible for the content that is transmitted over it. I'd rather not be arrested because some dirt-bag identity thief was using our wireless connection while sitting in our parking lot after hours to rip people off.

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Thank you for that excellent

Submitted by Doug Schweitzer on June 29, 2006 - 12:00 P.M.

Thank you for that excellent comment!

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