Adam DuVander likes to surf the Internet from his laptop wherever he happens to be -- at home, a coffee shop or a neighborhood park. He has been able to do so in recent years thanks to wireless hotspots set up by networking activists in Portland, Oregon.
So when Portland announced it would try to blanket the entire city with similar Wi-Fi technology, the Web programmer and blogger got excited -- until he tried using it.
The first 802.11n wireless equipment will be certified in June, despite the fact that the final version of the next-generation Wi-Fi standard is two years away and could be incompatible with current equipment.
WEP is dead - and here's the proof.
Cracking the Wi-Fi security protocol WEP is a probability game. The number of packets required to successfully decrypt the key depends on various factors, luck included. When WEP was compromised in 2001, the attack needed more than five million packets to succeed. During the summer of 2004, a hacker named KoreK published a new WEP attack (called chopper) that reduced by an order of magnitude the number of packets requested, letting people crack keys with hundreds of thousands of packets, instead of millions.
Partially for cost reasons (less money to spend versus regular wiring) and partially for convenience (users don't have to be close to a network jack), more wireless is starting to be deployed at my company. After reading about all of the security problems that come along with the benefits of having wireless as a part of the network, I am concerned about having enough protection in place will still having the wireless network being convenient to use. What do you suggest as possibilities for doing this?-- Via the Internet.
There are several things to look at.
The next time you splurge on a double latte and sip it while browsing the Internet via the cafe's Wi-Fi, beware of the "evil twin."
That's the term for a Wi-Fi access point that appears to be a legitimate one offered on the premises, but actually has been set up by a hacker to eavesdrop on wireless communications among Internet surfers. Unfortunately, experts say there is little consumers can do to protect themselves, but enterprises may be in better shape.
THE heart of London's financial district has gone wireless
"The Square Mile", Europe's premier financial centre, has been turned into an Wi-Fi hot spot that offers high-speed internet over the airwaves to laptops, handheld game consoles, Wi-Fi-enabled mobile phones and personal digital assistants.
Access will be free for a one month trial period, but subscriptions to the operator, The Cloud Networks, will cost $28.95 per month thereafter.
Internal Revenue Service offices across the nation that use wireless technology are still vulnerable to hackers, according to the latest assessment of the agency's security policies released Tuesday.
Despite efforts to improve wireless security the past four years, the Inspector General's assessment of 20 buildings in 10 cities discovered four separate locations at which hackers could have easily gained access to IRS computers using wireless technology.
Sprint Nextel is pushing forward with its plan to build a high-speed mobile WiMax network with the announcement of new device vendors, as well as additional markets where the new network will be deployed. Sprint, which is the third-largest mobile operator in the U.S., said in August that it would spend $3 billion in the next two years to build a network using the IP-based wireless technology known as WiMax. The company expects to build a network that can reach 100 million people by the end of 2008.
California start-up Shimon Systems has produced a biometrics package designed to make authentication easy on Wi-Fi networks. Despite endless iterations of Wi-Fi security specifications, users still have doubts, a lot of Wi-Fi networks are misconfigured, and 802.1x authentication is rarely applied at smaller businesses. Bio-NetGuard is intended to help those sites lock their Wi-Fi down without calling in specialists.
Simply booting up a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop can tell people sniffing wireless network traffic a lot about your computer--and about you.
Soon after a computer powers up, it starts looking for wireless networks and network services. Even if the wireless hardware is then shut-off, a snoop may already have caught interesting data. Much more information can be plucked out of the air if the computer is connected to an access point, in particular an access point without security.
