A friend recently asked me what kind of Wi-Fi security his small business should be using. He was going to use Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) because “everyone supports it.” No! Oh please no!
WEP’s been broken since 2001. Heck, there are even apps to break WEP Wi-Fi security. Mind you, if you’re fool enough to install an unknown cracking tool on your smartphone, you probably deserve all the misery it will bring you.
The bad news though really isn’t that WEP is so easy to break. It’s that so many people still use it. I mean, come on, it’s been fooling people into thinking their networks were secure for ten years now!
In 2010, I did a quick scan and hack on Wi-Fi networks in an office building to see if wireless security was as bad as I thought it was. It was, Ten of these were ‘secured’ with WEP. It took me less time to break into these then it did for me to write this much of this column. That tells you everything you need to know about WEP’s “security.”