With the advent of standardized 802.11n Wi-Fi, it’s easier than ever to expand your business network wirelessly, but that may not always be a smart idea.
I’m sitting outside an office building in Portland, Oregon. The building has at least half a dozen businesses with about 40 Wi-Fi access points (AP). In the hour I’ve been sitting here, I’ve broken into 28 of these corporate networks.
While I certainly know more about networking than most people do, I’ve no special expertise. I’m no hacker. I’m just making use of a good network packet analyzer, Wireshark (formerly known as Ethereal) and several common-as-dirt, dead simple to use cracking tools.
The simple truth is that, given a few days and publicly available programs, any wireless network can be broken. Sadly, as I just rediscovered today, most Wi-Fi networks don’t require that much trouble. Heck, it barely requires any effort at all.
Indeed, two of the businesses (downtown businesses, mind you, not Harry’s Home Network) didn’t have any security on their APs. Sigh. Leaving an open AP isn’t just a matter of letting other people share your bandwidth. It’s also an open door into your network. Another three were even worse: They used the default passwords for their wireless routers and APs. As for the rest, most were little more trouble to unlock.
That’s because most Wi-Fi security protocols are pathetically easy to break. For example, it’s a good bet that every Wi-Fi device your company has supports Wi-Fi Wired Equivalency Privacy (WEP). And many of you, including ten of the companies I just “visited,” use WEP for security.
It’s just too bad that WEP was broken, for all practical purposes, back in 2001. WEP stops someone with no clue about Wi-Fi networking security, but those are the only people that it will stop. However, every vendor still includes WEP as part of their laundry list of supported protocols; some reputable sources, like Consumer Reports, as recently as 2009 recommended WEP’s use. Consumer Reports subsequently corrected its mistake, but alas its “better” recommendation, WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access), is also pretty easy to crack.