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CNN Notices that WiFi is Insecure
josh3736 writes "From CNN comes an article that makes painstakingly obvious to the public what we already knew: 802.11 security is horrible. The article points out that nearly 40% of wireless network APs haven't even been changed from defaults and as many as 80% of home APs have encryption disabled. The article goes on to say that '[t]o make matters worse, users who don't secure their networks are often the very people who don't keep their computers up to date with the latest security patches and antivirus software.' It also accuses WiFi manufacturers of disabling security measures by default to make wireless easy to the lowest common denominator. My favorite quote? 'Experts say that while Wi-Fi hardware makers have made initial setup easy, the enabling of security is anything but. Meanwhile, average users are no longer tech savvy.' Which is to say that they at one point were?"
...I kept my Linksys WAP11 box wide open until one day I sat down at my computer to see that some fellow using the machine name "god" had joined the network and sent me a NetBIOS "net send" message. Ho ho, how clever.
Sigh... OK, fun time's over, no more sharing, hook up USB cable, generate hex key, etc. Kind of depressing.
The Army reading list
Yes, believe it or not, at one point your average user was at least marginally tech savvy.
That point in time was somewhere around 1985, and possibly on upwards to the early to mid 1990's. Not so, since Windows became synonymous with PC, and the Internet began to define personal computing.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
RIAA discovers that unsecure WiFi networks may create "reasonable doubt", thus hindering the criminalization of P2P activity. Film at eleven.
The WAP I'm using is in out-of-the-box factory default insecure mode.
I really wish I knew which of my neighbors owns it.
-JDF
Did they also notice the sky is blue?
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
CNN is an American TV network. The average American thinks that Bill Gates invented the personal computer (and that he is a national hero and a role model to be looked up to), that Excel is a general-purpose database program, that SQL is a Microsoft product ("SQL Server"), and that there is some inherent difference between Dell and Compaq. They randomly attribute any type of computer flakiness to "viruses" or "hackers", since those are the only causes for bork-ups that they understand. And just now their mass-market news network is discovering that WiFi is insecure. Is this any surprise? I'm just hoping that some day CNN will "discover" that Microsoft didn't invent the GUI, and that AOL isn't the Internet...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
My upstairs neighbor (apt. building) has an unencrypted Wireless Linksys router hooked up to his Broadband connection. If I wasn't hosting my domain's e-mail from one of my home machines, I would have cancelled my broadband a long time ago.
You're joking. C'mon, I mean... like, no way. It all makes sense now... if CNN is this far behind on technology, which moves pretty fast, then they are probably a good 25-30 years behind on their political reporting and viewpoints.
Damn hippies.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
My brother got a call a few months ago. They were having trouble with their Internet connection dropping all the time. He went to the site and found a brand new Dell with a wireless card. When he asked where the access point was, they looked at him like he was from Mars.
They had ordered their machine with a wireless card and thought that was all they needed. They were obviously piggy-backing onto a neighbor's wireless LAN but when my brother tried to explain that to them, they accused him of lying to them.
If you live in a trailer, do you really need WiFi? A 5-metre ethernet cable should do the trick. :-)
That's why I have all my gadgets, so I can work outside while smelling those roses :)
perl -e '$_="\007/4`\cp%2,".chr(127);s/./"\"\\c$&\""/gees
It is hard to break WEP. Even though attacks are theoretically possible, my experience is that it takes too long to collect enough packets. I let AirSnort run for most of a day. It collected nothing. On a low traffic home network, WEP is quite good.
I really do not know the details of attacking WEP, so maybe there are fast cracking approaches. Writing as someone who uses WEP and casually tried to break WEP, WEP provides a high barrier to network infiltration. A stranger would have to make a lengthy effort to do it.