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?"

Comments

You think that's bad?

[jalefkowit]

If cheap-o consumer routers getting 0wned thanks to pathetic Wi-Fi security seems bad, consider this: at least one vendor of e-voting systems depends on WEP as the only security measure between their voting machines and the ballot-counting system.

Yes, that's right -- ballots are passed wirelessly, and only protected via standard 802.11 WEP. How long until someone tries to 0wn a polling place? Or, worse, just sniffs the ballots out of the air and dumps them to a log file (so much for the secret ballot), say?

I wrote the article linked to above when the systems were being evaluated in Fairfax County, Virginia -- a wealthy and populous suburb of Washington, DC -- but they've since been approved by the county board of elections and used in two elections to date. Who knows how many other local governments have bought into similar systems?