* Wi-Fi presents another avenue of attack
Last week, the Web was all abuzz with a revelation out of Indiana University: Wireless LAN equipment, such as that used in Wi-Fi implementations around the country, could be targeted by a malicious attack.
Theoretically, an attack could spread very quickly in an urban area, where there are lots of WLANs in a small area. According to the IDG News Service, an attack “could take over 20,000 wireless routers in New York City within a two-week period, with most of the infections occurring within the first day.”
Such an attack would bank on the fact that many WLAN routers aren’t installed in a very secure manner. An attack could guess administrative passwords and then install worm-like firmware that would make an infected router attack any other wireless routers in its range, the IDG News Service writes. In a densely populated area, this could be disastrous.
In truth, the possibility of an airborne attack shouldn’t be too surprising. People have been talking about the security problems of Wired Equivalent Privacy, or WEP, for a long time. In fact, if you’re using the newer, more secure Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), the researchers say you don’t have to worry about such an infection.
The thing is, there are so many WLAN routers in major cities these days, and their effective ranges overlap so much. And, according to the researchers, only about 25% of the routers in New York have encryption. Interestingly, the percentage of encrypted routers in San Francisco is higher (about 40%), but that still means a majority do not have any encryption protection.
