Category: Security

Wireless local-area networks which are also referred to as WLANs or Wi-Fi are prevalent these days. They are so popular that they can be found installed in offices, colleges, hotels, cafes, and even homes. There are many Wi-Fi product vendors and service providers, providing different products with different services and features. The main reason behind...

The Android platform is currently the top selling mobile platform in the U.S., and in quarter four of 2010 smartphones began to outsell PC platforms worldwide. Android was even recently picked up as the choice platform for the U.S. Department of Defense. With the ubiquitousness of Android growing, naturally it and other smartphone platforms will...

This is my first guest blogging opportunity on Netstumbler.com and I wanted to discuss what I believe is missing in most of the student/consultants I encounter. I would recommend these things for anyone preparing to be a consultant in IT security. So, the first and most important thing to learn in my opinion is TCP/IP....

Christmas is around the corner. Some of the top gifts are going to be shiny new mobile devices – smartphones, tablets, hacked Kindle Fires, Playbooks, and others. Is Exchange ActiveSync turned on in your environment? What is your plan for handling mobility in the Enterprise? But the biggest question of all is – What does...

I don't normally post personal items, but I think that everyone should know about some of the horrible things happening at San Diego International Airport and with Delta Airlines. I wrote this immediately after the events that transpired so that I would have an accurate log. Summers are the busiest travel time of the year....

Wi-Fi hackers have gotten more advanced and your private information is even more at risk. The recent Black Hat conference in Las Vegas featured a demonstration by Errata Security that detailed how a hacker can use new tools to steal your encrypted cookies and passwords and then control your online sessions. Errata has combated this...

Duke University is facing a wireless LAN crisis which seems to be related to the recent release of Apple's iPhone. Up to 30 wireless access points can be knocked out at a time as the built-in 802.11b/g adapter on the newly released phone flood the area with MAC address requests. The requests are for an...

RSA Security Inc. conducted its annual survey of New York, London and Paris and found that more wireless hot spots are working to secure their networks but a fifth of corporate access points remain open. In all three cities the percentage of hot spots protected by some form of encryption increased; London went from 76...

RSA, the security division of EMC, has found that larger cities have more Wi-Fi than ever and more security but the security is woefully outdated. Using New York, London and Paris as their target cities, they have found the number of Wi-Fi access points have risen 49%, 44% and 160% respectively. Encryption was found to...

Debate over the safety of Wi-Fi radiation levels in Britain continues. Britain has adopted municipal Wi-Fi fairly well and has added millions of users and several wireless cities to its roster, but they're now finding the debate over health and safety is spreading. Stirring the pot of contention is the BBC program Panorama, which is...

With the ease in cracking the Wireless Equivalent Protection (WEP) code, many experts have recommended the use of Wi-fi Protected Access (WPA) to secure home wireless Internet networks. Unlike WEP, which hackers can breach in as little as 60 seconds, WPA appears to be a formidable protocol. "We have had a very close look at...

Leaving a wireless access point (WAP) open is generally considered a bad idea. Experts suggest you could be opening yourself to criminals by not password protecting your WiFi Network. But if you are a criminal then keeping and open WAP may become your defense. A growing number of file sharers believe they can throw reasonable...

The city of Redditch in the UK has two unlikely criminals. The pair were recently arrested for using other people's WiFi broadband internet connections without permission. Neighbors had become frustrated at the man parked in front of their home on his laptop and called the police. The police arrested the man and cautioned him for...

If you're relying on Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol for Wi-Fi security you may be at risk. Three German security researchers have found a way to tap into WEP protected data within a minute. Previosly, WEP had been criticized for flaws in the basic algorithm structure but cracking into the system took several minutes. Now,...

Researchers at the Technische Universitat Darmstadt have found a way to crack 104-bit WEP, a typical security tool for 802.11b/g/n networks. The team used a 1.7GHz Pentium-M machine to compute the success rate of grabbing the key. The attack needs sufficient traffic, so the researchers made the protected network generate packets. At 40,000 packets, the...