Home WiFi safer than businesses networks
p2pnet news view | WiFi:- War driving is a two word description for the practice of cruising around, searching for open WiFi networks.
And an international ring of hackers turned it into a very profitable exercise, using it to steal 40 million credit card numbers from restaurants and businesses last summer, says Heise Online.
The story has US security provider RSA says even after seven years of annual studies, wireless network security is still far from adequate.
Home WiFi networks are, it says, much safer.
Many business wireless networks are either unprotected or insufficiently secure but it found private networks are generally, “much better locked down”.
“In Paris, 98% of all home networks were encrypted, in New York 97% and in London 90%,” says RSA in the story, which adds:
“In addition, the home networks used far better encryption methods than the corporate networks – in Paris and New York, more private users than businesses protect their networks with strong encryption.”
London had the lowest level of security of the cities surveyed, said Heise, adding:
“Although as many businesses as homes use strong encryption, overall, not enough corporate networks have any protection at all. One in five corporate networks are completely unprotected. This is even more than last year and more than in any other category in any city studied. The highest number of security improvements, on the other hand, was found in Paris, where 94% of all corporate networks and 98% of private networks are encrypted.”
Heise Online – Private Wi-Fi more secure than corporate wireless networks, October 31, 2008
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November 1st, 2008 at 4:47 am
I wanted to live in a world where there was free wifi everywhere. For a while the linksys/belkin/dlink default community network meant that it was happening. So I don’t exactly welcome this new world where there’s wifi everywhere but you can’t use it.
Linking credit card information theft and insecure wifi is absurd. What this really means is that the systems have no inherent security. They should never be built on the basis that the network is secure.