Wifi links vulnerable even with encryption
Free tools crack WEP and WPA with ease, McAfee expert warns.
Wireless networks are extremely vulnerable to intrusion from hackers - even with encryption switched on, say leading security experts.
Foundstone, a division of McAfee, cautioned that the tools needed to carry out such attacks are freely available on the internet and that some distributions of Linux are specially pre-configured for these tasks.
No specialist knowledge is required to break a wireless network's encryption so there's a wider pool of potential hackers to guard against. WEP encryption is particularly susceptible to 'network sniffing' whereby malicious users listen in on the packets of information being exchanged between computers. When enough packets have been gathered it becomes almost trivial to crack the encryption and reveal the network's password.
