Wireless

A Wi-Fi management firm has warned that companies may be unaware that their data is open to hackers because staff have set up their own wireless networks.

AirMagnet claimed that one employee could put the whole network at risk simply by plugging their own router into an access point.

"We go into a lot of companies which say 'we haven't got any wireless access' and we do a demo and three or four access points pop up," Ian Schenkel, EMEA managing director at AirMagnet, told vnunet.com.

The programme explored the question of whether the development of wi-fi in schools and city centres posed a risk to health. Two viewers complained that the programme gave an unbalanced impression of the state of scientific opinion on the issue (thus exaggerating the grounds for concern), that it wrongly suggested wi-fi installations give off a higher level of radiation than mobile phone masts, and that an experiment designed to test whether certain people were hypersensitive to such radiation had been misleadingly presented.

Mobily, Saudi Arabia's second mobile phone firm, said on Saturday it would spend at least 4 billion riyals ($1.07 billion) in the next two years building broadband and wireless networks.

Mobily, which lost a bid this year to run one of Saudi Arabia's fixed-line networks, has invested 5.2 billion riyals building its mobile phone network in the world's biggest oil exporter, since 2005, Chief Executive Khaled al-Kaf said.

"We will aggressively invest in fixed-line substitution," Kaf told Reuters by telephone.

More than half of computer users have illegally logged on to someone else’s wi-fi connection yet only 11 people have been arrested for the crime, an investigation by The Times has found.

“Wi-fi tapping” or “piggybacking” has boomed in the past few years as hackers take advantage of unsecured computers to access the internet without paying for it.

Police regard it as a serious offence because intruders can download pornographic materials and illegal images without being caught. Only the legitimate holder of the wi-fi account is likely to be tracked down.

The Get Safe Online campaign held in London today is a government-backed initiative that outlined a number of issues users needed to be aware of when protecting themselves from online attacks, as it found that 7.8 million Britons have insecure home networks.

In order for homeowners to secure their wireless networks, users should switch on the built-in WPA or WEP encryption to prevent casual eavesdropping, rename the network and switch off SSID broadcast so people can't find your network too easily, and use MAC filtering to restrict access to trusted computers.

Transformation of the UK’s market for wireless broadband is the bold aim of a new initiative by BT and FON.

The two firms say that their BT FON service will be the world’s largest Wi-Fi community with over 3 million consumer customers invited to join a global community of people sharing their broadband.

It was cracked long ago, but hacks for the discredited WEP wireless security protocol still keep coming. The latest one to be uncovered is the work of AirTight Networks’ researchers Vivek Ramachandran and MD Sohail Ahmad, and was demonstrated at last weekend’s Toorcon9 conference.

Aided by flaws in the Windows Wi-Fi stack, the new attack involved coaxing an isolated Windows laptop into sending back ARP packets in response to a barrage of the same from the attacking machine, from which the WEP (wired equivalency protocol) key can be recovered.

Wimax has been approved as a 3G standard by the International Telecommunications Union, boosting its appeal as an alternative to existing 3G broadband data services.

The ITU decision will allow Wimax to compete directly with technologies such as UMTS and Edge as a service for 3G spectrum owners. It has previously been confined to other parts of the radio spectrum.

Wimax has been championed by Intel, the world's biggest chipmaker. Intel sees Wimax as the next growth area for its Wi-Fi technologies, offering longer range and broader coverage.

If you use a secure wireless network, hackers may be able to steal data from your computer in the time it takes to have a cup of coffee. At the Toorcon hacking conference in San Diego this coming weekend, security researcher Vivek Ramachandran, will demonstrate a technique he's developed to attack laptops that use the WEP encryption system to log on to secure wireless networks.

Nokia is planning to bundle software from Devicescape on devices in its E and N series, that will log in automatically to Wi-Fi hotspots.

"We wanted to make Wi-Fi feel as seamless as the cellular networks," said Dave Fraser, chief executive of Devicescape. The software, which is already available for download on the Devicescape's site can get devices online instantly on Wi-Fi networks, using user-names and passwords stored previously loaded on Devicescape's site.