A recent newspaper report Gatton Star on October 3rd leads me to write about Wireless Network Security.
For quite some time now, I have been advising customers of the risk of installing a domestic-grade Wi-Fi Access Point. These units make it easy for anyone with a laptop in your home or office to connect to the Internet.
While the designers of these devices have included the ability to make the wireless signal secure this feature is normally disabled and must be enabled by a technician for security of the wireless signal to work properly.
Correctly enabling the Wireless Security feature is often overlooked or beyond the ability of non-technical users. This insecure wireless signal spreads out from the source and is easily hacked into by any knowledgeable user with a laptop computer.
These days many ADSL Modems are sold with the local Wi-Fi wireless facility built in and turned on. Many users are unaware that this signal will radiate and give anyone within range free access to this signal and therefore they will have access to the Internet and to the local network of PCs and other devices connected to that access point. If the owner of the ADSL Connection pays for the Internet by data volume used, the extra data used by the Guests could lead to a very large bill for excess usage.
This is exactly what happened to some businesses in the main street of Gatton. They were hacked into by people using Laptops in their cars in the street near their businesses, leading to unexpected accounts for excess data usage.
There are now three main types of data encryption to enable the wireless signal to be secure. The first and oldest of these methods is called WEP or Wired Equivalency Protocol – unfortunately this uses an encryption key that is transmitted with the data. These days’ hackers can capture a stream of data from a wireless access point that uses WEP decrypt the Key and then break into the Data Stream.
The newer security protocols are much harder to break and so now the computer industry recommends that users should be using WPA or WPA2 i.e. Wi-Fi Protected access of Wi-Fi Protected Access version2. With these new methods, all that is needed is to program into both the Access Point and the Laptop a starting key usually in the form of a “Pass Phrase”. This then rolls on automatically without the actual key being transmitted. Pass Phrases take the form of a sentence like “mydogbringsinthenewspaperforme” No one is going to guess that in a hurry.
Users who need help in setting up wireless or other networking systems can call a computer service such as Aspire Computing see advert this page. Wishing you Happy and Safe Computing.