Wireless

The bad guys are drooling over all the delicious info they can suck from your ever-growing wireless network. Where once there were only computers and servers to steal information from now there are dual-mode cell phones (that often seek the nearest WiFi connections without your approval or knowledge); Blu-ray players and gaming consoles that connect to the Internet; tables; laptops ... virtually everything you do, everything you know, everything that defines the essence of you is contained neatly on your network.

HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE attending London's Infosec conference logged into a rogue wireless hotspot that could have left them open to attack by hackers. For a couple of hours on days one and two of the conference, insecurity firm Cryptocard created a wireless hotspot called 'Infosecfreewifi'. It found that 143 people connected to the rogue network on Tuesday and 162 people on Wednesday. In the space of just two hours on each day.

If you're a mobile worker and like to go online using public Wi-Fi services, like those in coffee shops, you probably don't realize how insanely reckless you're being.

Public Wi-Fi is the worst kind of Internet connection. Data isn't encrypted as it flies through the air and, as the recent Firesheep debacle showed, it's incredibly easy for others using the same network to grab your login details for sites like Facebook

A team of researchers has developed a technology that has the potential to double the speed of wireless radios – such as those used by Wi-Fi – by allowing signals to be received and transmitted simultaneously.

"Textbooks say you can't do it," said Stanford University assistant professor Philip Levis when announcing the breakthrough. "The new system completely reworks our assumptions about how wireless networks can be designed."

It's the digital equivalent of mooching a cup of sugar, only without asking. Some 32 percent of respondents to a recent national survey admitted borrowing a neighbor's unencrypted Wi-Fi connection. That's nearly double the 18 percent who said they borrowed Wi-Fi in a 2008 poll.

"The reality is that many consumers have not taken the steps to protect themselves," said Kelly Davis-Felner, marketing director at the Wi-Fi Alliance, a non-profit trade group that commissioned the surveys.

In recognition of national Data Privacy Day, which falls on Friday, Jan. 28, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is urging state residents to protect their personal and communications data by encrypting their wireless Internet networks. The attorney general’s warning stems from her investigation into Google’s collection of unencrypted data from consumers’ home networks.

Not all potential security breaches at an airport can be captured on a cell phone and posted as a YouTube video.

One such danger lurks in the form of free wireless Internet access offered by many airports throughout the nation and in other public places.

Salesmen in China are making money from long-known weaknesses in a Wi-Fi encryption standard, by selling network key-cracking kits for the average user.

Wi-Fi USB adapters bundled with a Linux operating system, key-breaking software and a detailed instruction book are being sold online and at China's bustling electronics bazaars. The kits, pitched as a way for users to surf the Web for free, have drawn enough buyers and attention that one Chinese auction site, Taobao.com, had to ban their sale last year.

The long-awaited ability to use a cellphone or Wi-Fi connection on an aircraft might become a casualty of the latest aviation security threat.

It was revealed on 29 October that parcels containing a powdered explosive packed in laser printer cartridges had travelled undetected on aircraft to the UK and to Dubai in the UAE. A cellphone connected to a detonation circuit could have allowed a terrorist to trigger an explosion by calling or texting the phone.