Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) allows users to gain convenient wireless internet access, though without the sufficient security precautions it can also let ‘outsiders or intruders’ to do the same without anyone noticing.
As hot-spots are becoming increasingly popular and cities working towards becoming entirely wireless, users become more vulnerable to cyber crime. ‘Techno-criminals’ can attack a users wireless network in order to gain free internet usage or obtain personal and valuable information. This is particularly important for the corporate sector where confidential information is abundant (Mead & McGraw 2003). These criminals can steal a persons identify, find financial records or use the internet account to send spam or pornography that is only traceable back to the user. There is also the threat of viruses and ‘keylogging’, that records every key a wireless user presses in order to get passwords to access a ‘secure site’, for example a bank account. In response to this alarming threat the FBI now has a cyber-crime squad, one initiative towards protecting WiFi users (Gray 2004). Another WiFi associated problem is “War chalking�, the practice of marking special symbols on the walls of buildings and houses to let other wireless freeloaders know where an available wireless network is in a location. The “War driver� who is the person that takes it upon themselves to find wireless access points in homes and businesses with an antenna and a wireless computer. Whilst war drivers and other users are mainly after free internet access, it does raise security concerns (Gardiner 2002).
The threat of intrusion into the home wireless network has forced users to adopt a range of security. Wireless routers now come equipped with Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) which encrypts data set over the network so that outsides can no longer access content. The ability of persistent hackers with high powered laptops has forced some uses to move to an even more secure protocol, WiFi Protected Access (WPA), which not only uses 128bit encryption, but locks on to individual computers and changes the access key every 10000 packets.
Gardiner, J 2002, Wartalking, Communications International, November, p. 12.
Gray, A 2004, Wireless Internet Users Can Be Inviting Targets for Crime, Knight Ridder Tribune Business News, February, p. 1.
Mead, N & McGraw, G 2003, Wireless Security’s Future, IEEE Security and Privacy, July/August, pp. 68-72.
Jillian Hodgson 08:22, 29 Oct 2004 (EST)
