Sunday, October 19, 2008

Wireless Security still lacking in mumbai, Survey Report

Deloitte has done a survey of Wireless devices
in Mumbai and wow the results are still alarming for the law
enforcement agencies even after the shocking terror activities. People
are just not willing to secure their wireless devices with WEP or WPA.

The key findings for the survey are:
1) Of the 6729 wireless networks seen, 36% appeared to be unprotected i.e. without any encryption,
2) 52% were using low level of protection i.e. Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption.
3) Balance 12% were using the more secure Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA).
4) This makes 88 % of the observed wireless networks relatively easy to compromise.

There
is a lot more to be done in mumbai because I remember going wardriving
around the city a few years back and got so many open wireless
connections that there was no need to buy internet connection at home
just sit in the car and do your stuff.

This is surely a
challenge for the law enforcement agencies, The ISP's should educate
users to secure their Wifi connections and there has to be a regular
audit from the ISP side to make sure the wireless devices in their
networks are using some sort of authentication. We can always argue
that even WEP can be cracked in a few hours and the same holds true for
WPA and WPA/2 which was recently cracked up to the speed boost of
10,000 times with the use of Nvidia Graphics card.

It is a
challenge to make all the wifi owners to fix their wireless devices but
with the proper help from ISP it should become easier but it is a task
government needs to take up.

-Abhiz

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