As security concerns ease, businesses warm to Wi-Fi

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Not foolproof

There are utilities that allow you to specify your MAC address (I've seen them on Linux). However, if you specify MAC address and require a password to join the network, that's gotta be hard to hack by brute force.

However, 40bit WEP requires only a 15GB database to hack the packet encryption so you could snoop and masquerade on the network without knowing any MAC addresses, passwords or network names. As far as I can remember (and I may be wrong) once you hacked one packet, you got the rest because 40 bit WEP uses a simple algorithm to select the next vector.

You just have to scan for the packets in the appropriate RF bands, hack some and away you go. It was proven to work. However, I've not heard of anyone getting any useful information or doing any damage using this method.

Posted by: Fred Fredrickson   Posted on: 11/10/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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