86% of Indian wireless networks surveyed ‘vulnerable’
How secure are wireless networks in our cities? Mostly not secure enough, if the results of a ‘war driving’ exercise conducted by Deloitte India across 12 cities is any indication. This exercise covered 35,860 wireless networks in these cities, and involved driving around selected areas with laptops having a built-in wireless card to capture information about networks in the neighbourhood.
The survey results, released recently by Deloitte in association with Data Security Council of India, revealed that 86 per cent of the networks could have been “easy to compromise.” That was because 37 per cent of them were unprotected (being used without any encryption), while 49 per cent were using a wireless security protocol with a low level of protection — Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), as opposed to Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) or Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2), which offered higher levels of protection.
The security issue has come under the spotlight following reports that unsecured wireless networks were used to send terror threats in recent times.
