So You Think Your Wi-Fi Network is Secure?

Wi-Fi networks deliver tremendous benefits. They provide the ability to connect to the Internet almost anywhere at anytime. You can connect in your home, office, or the coffee shop without being tethered to a wall jack, and Wi-Fi is built into most laptop PC's.

Wi-Fi is also easy to set up if you don't think about security. Out of the box, you can quickly turn on your wireless network, and connect your without much effort. Without security however, everyone else can connect to your network with the same ease. If you don't take the steps to secure your wireless network everything you do over the wireless network can also be seen by hackers up to a mile away.

Who Needs Wireless Security?

One of the common reasons why users don't secure their Wi-Fi networks is that no one wants access to their network or that there is no important information on the network to worry about. Hacking is less about joy-riding on someone else's network and more about the financial payoff that can be gained by stealing confidential or personal information over the network. In fact, over half of cyber crimes are now committed over Wi-Fi networks, because they provide anonymity that wired networks don't provide.

With a poorly secured Wi-Fi network, a wireless hacker can read your email, see the websites you visit, and even access files on your system that aren't properly secured. Your e-mail username and password are easily picked off an unsecured Wi-Fi network when every time your email is updated. Once your e-mail account is compromised, it becomes very easy to gain personal identity.

Another common misconception is that Wi-Fi can only be accessed from 300 feet away. With a $50 antenna, a hacker can access your Wi-Fi network from a mile away, out of sight and undetectable.

War drivers looking for unsecured networks, locate and record Wi-Fi networks. They then share those locations on websites such as www.wigle.net for other war drivers and hackers to find and user those networks.

Why Are So Many Networks Unsecured?

While setting up a Wi-Fi network is easy, turning on security takes some technical expertise and the ability to understand terms like WEP, WPA, 802.1x, and EAP. While wireless equipment manufacturers provide access to these security parameters, very few of them make it easy to understand, or easy to set-up.

Wi-Fi Security for Dummies

There are 4 basic levels of Wi-Fi security: "Open" (unsecured), WEP, WPA-PSK, and 802.1X. Let’s walk through these techno-acronyms and explain these basic levels of security in less technical terms.

• "Open" is just that, open to all comers without any basic level of security. Like leaving your front door unlocked for anyone to enter, open networks are just a bad idea.

• WEP is the lowest level of security available on most Wi-Fi networks. Unfortunately, WEP have fundamental flaws that make it easy to hack and software on the Internet can crack WEP security in 10 minutes. WEP is equivalent to locking your screen door; it may keep your neighbor out, but it takes little effort to break in.

• WPA is the successor to WEP that is more difficult to crack. WPA is comparable to having a single lock on your front door, and giving a key to everyone you want to give access to. Keys can be shared or walked away with when someone leaves the network. The challenge with WPA is removing someone requires the entire network to be re-keyed and new keys re-distributed to valid users.

• "802.1X" is called enterprise-level security because it provides the highest level of Wi-Fi security available. 802.1X is widely deployed by Fortune 500 companies and eliminates the common key problem by providing a unique key for each valid user every time they enter the network. This is analogous to the room key used in hotels. Each authorized user gets a new unique key every time they enter the network valid only for the time they are on the network.

802.1x typically requires a RADIUS server, which takes training and some technical work to deploy and maintain. This put the highest level of Wi-Fi security out of reach for most small and mid-sized businesses because of implementation costs.

Products like WiTopia's SecureMyWiFi Business Edition addresses the need for small and mid-sized businesses to quickly and easily deploy strong Wi-Fi security. It can deliver 802.1x enterprise level security for small and midsize business that can be set up in less than 15 minutes without any wireless or security expertise.

It's important that wireless network users understand the dangers of unsecured networks, and properly secure their networks. Open (unsecured) and WEP are poor approaches to Wi-Fi security. WPA, while complex, offers a base level of security, and 802.1x offers the best security available. Businesses are best advised to use 802.1x through either RADIUS server or the more simplified approach that WiTopia offers.

Is Your Wi-Fi Network Listed on the Internet?

Interested statistics from www.wigle.net where Wi-Fi hackers and and war drivers that capture Wi-Fi network information and post to the internet:

Total number of networks found: over 11,280,000

Percent of networks protected with WEP: 44.0%

Percent of networks not protected (without WEP): 40.5%

Percent of networks unknown: 15.4%

Pretty scary thought - somewhere between 40% and 56% of all Wi-Fi networks have no Wi-Fi security.

wigle.net is an interesting site. It's worth checking out to see if your network is on the hacker's radar screen. They have a great interactive map that allows you to type in your physical address and zoom into all of the networks (open and secured) that have been found by war drivers in your neighborhood.

Is your unsecured network listed on the Internet for everyone to see?

Wi-Fi Security for Dummies

There are 4 basic levels of Wi-Fi security: "Open" (unsecured), WEP, WPA- PSK, and 802.1X. Let's walk through these techno-acronyms and explain these basic levels of security in less technical terms.

• "Open" is just that, open to all comers without any basic level of security. Like leaving your front door unlocked for anyone to enter, open networks are just a bad idea.

• WEP is the lowest level of security available on most Wi-Fi networks. Unfortunately, WEP have fundamental flaws that make it easy to hack and software on the Internet can crack WEP security in 10 minutes. WEP is equivalent to locking your screen door; it may keep your neighbor out, but it takes little effort to break in.

• WPA is the successor to WEP that is more difficult to crack. WPA is comparable to having a single lock on your front door, and giving a key to everyone you want to give access to. Keys can be shared or walked away with when someone leaves the network. The challenge with WPA is removing someone requires the entire network to be re-keyed and new keys re-distributed to valid users.

• "802.1X" is called enterprise-level security because it provides the highest level of Wi-Fi security available. 802.1X is widely deployed by Fortune 500 companies with a RADIUS Server and eliminates the common key problem by providing a unique key for each valid user every time they enter the network. This is analogous to the room key used in hotels. Each authorized user gets a new unique key every time they enter the network valid only for the time they are on the network.

The Five Deadly Dangers of Unsecured WiFi Networks

Once hackers have access to your WiFi network, they can readily capture personal and business information. There are two types of WiFi attacks. Passive attacks, where the hacker captures your network traffic, are almost impossible to detect because the hacker never joins your network. They can sit silently with their antenna tuned into your network and capture gigabytes of network traffic for off-line analysis at a later time. Active attacks, where the hacker joins the network, can be the most devastating because they can launch active attacks into the network and onto your devices on the network.

There are 5 attacks that WiFi hackers can very easily & readily perform on your wireless network with very little effort or expense. The first two are passive attacks, and the last 3 are active attacks. But make no mistake - all of these attacks can be deadly.

Deadly Attack #1: Account and Password Capture. There are several applications that send your account and passwords in clear text over the network. For example, every time a POP3 mail account checks for new e-mail, the account name & password are in the clear as part of the data transfer. Anyone sniffing the network traffic can easily get your e-mail account information. Once they have that information, they can access your e-mail account at their leisure, monitoring for personal information without leaving a trace. From there, any confidential information they can get from your account just escalates their attack.

Deadly Attack #2: E-mail, IM and Web Site Traffic Capture - It is very easy to monitor and capture all of the e-mail traffic sent over an unsecured wireless network. Since most e-mail is sent in clear-text, and instant messaging is sent in HTML, it's very simple to capture the traffic and mine the traffic off line for any “interesting” information at a later time. By monitoring your wireless traffic, all of the HTML data can be captured & reconstituted as web pages on the hackers PC to see exactly what web sites & content you are surfing over the wireless network.

Deadly Attack #3: Accessing Data on Your PC. Let's face it, it's pretty easy to turn file sharing on, and then forget to turn it off when you attach to an open WiFi network. Once file sharing has been left on or the personal firewall is mis-configured, a hacker can readily access you PC and hard drive across the wireless network. Firewalls are also easy to mis-configure or turn off, and forget to turn back on. With older versions of Windows (NT, W2K), if improperly configured, it's easy prey for a hacker to get in over the network, log-in as a null session and take over your platform.

Deadly Attack #4: Access to the Corporate Network. If you’re wireless network is connected to a corporate network through a site-to-site VPN, an open wireless network punches a hole through the network, and opens up both sides of the VPN to anyone attaching to the network. Another threat is with improperly configured client VPNs which can be more easily compromised to provide the hacker access through the VPN.

Deadly Attack #5: SPAM and Virus Launching over the Wireless Network. Unsecured Networks provide are an ideal launch point from which hackers can launch SPAM & Virus attacks because it is very difficult to track the source back to them. From a distance, the SPAMmer can launch the SPAM (from your e-mail account if he or she sniffed your e-mail account info) without repudiation. When the ISP or FBI tracks down the violator, the trail points to your network, and possibly your e-mail account. The liabilities to the owner of the unsecured network are still newly contended battlegrounds for the lawyers.

Hacking open networks isn't as hard as one may think. See this flash demonstration on the tools hackers use to crack WiFi networks.

6 Common Fallacies of Wireless Network Security

No one wants to get into my WiFi network, and if they get a free ride on the internet who cares? Unfortunately, we live in a world where crimes and vandalism is common place, even more so when the crime can go undetected. Many hackers or disgruntled employees are merely looking to compromise someone's systems whether or not there are huge payoffs – these vandals break in simply because they can. Through your open WiFi network, and intentional hacker can destroy the network and every PC on the network. Imagine the cost to your organization if a hacker launches a virus directly into your network or re-initializes the hard drives on every PC they could access.

I don't have any important information that anyone would want to access. Many people believe that their electronic information is not at risk or of little value to anyone who sees it. This is dangerous thinking. With simple sniffing software, (look over the shoulder of a Wi-Fi hacker) every packet of data you send or receive over the WiFi network can be read and stored to disk. Most users don't realize that when they access their e-mail from a POP3 account over WiFi, their e-mail account user name and password are readable over the air. Imagine the access to personal and confidential information a hacker can have after capturing your e-mail password and having unrestricted access to your e-mail account for months on end without being detected.

There's no one within 300 feet of my building, and WiFi can’t reach beyond that point. Many users falsely believe that they are secure because none of their neighbors are within 300 feet of their home or office. In fact, with a $100 directional antenna hackers can access your WiFi network traffic and PC data from as far as a mile away, making it very difficult to pinpoint the hacker at all. Another common WiFi hacker trick is to leave an unmonitored PC in their car, hotel room, or other temporary location. The PC can be connected to aantenna pointing at your office or home and collects gigabytes of network traffic for off-line analysis after the PC is retrieved. It is nearly impossible to detect a hacker listening to your WiFi network.

If I put in a WiFi network, no one else will find it. War driving is the practice of finding & logging WiFi networks. With a high powered antenna, GPS, and a laptop, war drivers can detect and plot your WiFi network on a global grid. These war drivers then file the location of your network into a permanent database on the web. Once an unsecured WiFi network is found by these war drivers, anyone can pinpoint the exact location of your WiFi network (complete with road maps) on the internet. Go to www.wigle.net to see if your WiFi network is already one of the 9,300,000 Wi-Fi networks that have been logged already.

MAC address filtering can do the job. MAC address filtering is dangerous because it provides a false sense of security to the unsuspecting. Many WiFi access points and routers allow MAC address filtering – a low level check on the MAC address or identifier of your WiFi interface – to determine if a particular PC should be allowed access on the WiFi network. There are 2 significant problems with MAC address filtering. First, it doesn’t prevent passive attacks. A hacker can still capture and listen to your WiFi network traffic without ever being seen. And second, if hackers want access to your network, they need only listen for a valid MAC address, and change the MAC address on their PC to match a valid address. This can be done in less than a minute.

WEP Security is good enough. WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) uses common 60 or 108 bit key shared among all of the devices on the network to encrypt the WiFi data. Unfortunately, WEP is a very weak form of security. Hackers can access tools freely available on the internet like WEPcrack, Aircrack, and Airsnort that can crack a WEP key in as little as 15 minutes. Once the WEP key is cracked, the WiFi network traffic instantly turns into clear text – making it easy for the hacker to treat the WiFi network like any open network.

Good Tool for Secure Access at WiFi Hotspots

Even if you secure your own WiFi Network, you can still face the challenge of getting a secure network connection on a public WiFi network (WiFi hotspot). Because it's so easy to capture an e-mail username and password on an unsecured WiFi network (look over the shoulder of a wireless hacker, you should never connect to a public WiFi network without a secure connection One way to effectively deal with this is to make sure that your e-mail connection uses an SSL connection. Many e-mail providers will provide you the SSL connection ports if you poke & prod them enough for the information. Another alternative is to use a personal VPN like that available from WiTopia. The personalVPN works in the background to seamlessly secure your sent and received data via an encrypted tunnel to WiTopia's Internet gateways. Works with any and all applications including email, instant messaging, and web surfing.

WiFi Security is Essential for Small Business Networks

Over 60% of the wireless networks used by small and mid-sized businesses are unsecure, leaving the door wide open to hackers to steal personal identity and confidential corporate information, access computer networks, and launch attacks from the business networks. Many businesses do not understand how vulnerable they are to attack over their WiFi networks.

WiFi Security is essential - using WPA or WPA2 technology. Set it up and use it. There are a number of small business WiFi Security Servers out there (based on RADIUS technology) that can hide many or most of the technical details. Don't let hackers pull your passwords, business and personal information off your wireless networks.