Protect Yourself Against Wi-Fi Bandwidth Vampires

Wireless networking can open up the enterprise network to all kinds of viruses, malware

and black hat hackers. It's not as tough as you think to get protection --- here's what you should do.


They come by night -- and, for that matter, by day -- furtively sucking the lifeblood from unprotected Wi-Fi networks wherever they find them. They're wireless bandwidth vampires.
It isn't difficult to find an unprotected wireless access these days, whether it's from a home user's wireless router or a small business or departmental access point. You need only flip open your laptop in most major cities to find a list of available networks named "default" or "linksys." And if they have they're set to their default settings, you can be sure that you'll have all the access you need.

Unprotected wireless networks that are open to all and sundry bandwidth suckers are really more of a problem for small organizations than large ones, says Forrester Research principal analyst Ellen Daley. The Wi-Fi market has bifurcated, and large enterprises have gotten smarter, and the access hardware targeted to their needs has become more secure.

"The problem is the cheap devices you can buy from places like Circuit City," Daley says. "A wireless router costs $60 today. Small business will buy them, but they come with no security enabled out of the box."

And the small business user often won't dig too deeply to set the device up for Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) authentication or Wire Equivalence Protection (WEP). The whole point of wireless networking for many companies, Daley says, is convenience, and one of the big attractions of mass-market Wi-Fi is its plug-and-play simplicity, regardless of the security dangers.

Lest large enterprises smugly sit back on their security laurels, consider this: the same errors of convenience can afflict even the biggest corporations at the departmental level. After all, air-tight security policies and the latest enterprise-grade, hardened access points only protect an organization if the IT department deploys all of its hardware. However, the small department that sets up its own Wi-Fi with a consumer router can open the enterprise to all kinds of trouble from wireless vampires.

"Large enterprises tend to have the acts together," Daley says. "But the rogue employees who just buy an access point and plug it into a port in the wall can be a real problem."

In fact, it can be a really big problem, says Rohip Mehra, director of wireless product management for 3Com. "If a department goes and buys its own unsecured access point, in the process it open up the whole enterprise network, both wired and wireless, to everybody," he says. "That's where the problems come in."