Bad Reception
Source: Entrepreneur.com
Who's reading your e-mail? Hackers? Competitors? If you're among the companies that have set up an 802.11b-or Wi-Fi-Wireless LAN (WLAN), you may have more people downloading files from your network than you have on your payroll. Some may even be planning to sabotage you.
Crackers (expert hackers) have begun "war driving"-that is, cruising neighborhoods using sniffer programs on Wi-Fi-equipped portables to find WLAN nodes. They're also developing software to exploit 802.11b's weak 40-bit Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption and other vulnerabilities.
"Right now, they're doing some experimental looking and touching to see what they can access," says Elias Ladopoulos, chief strategy officer at Digital Frameworks Inc. in Forest Hills, New York. "The next step is to develop applications that will take advantage of these vulnerabilities."
