A couple other notes on this subject for general consumption...
Chris BONDE wrote:
I am a little reticent in using wireless.
There has been reported cases were WiFi has been set up in a hot zone. Then a
bandit captures all the important info, hence steals your ID.
Public hot-zones are inherently unsafe because they are, by definition,
open and public. There's no authentication or encryption. Private
hot-zones -- the kind you pay for, or internal corporate networks -- CAN
be made very secure if the administrators care to take the trouble.
In the old days there were reported cases of capturing the print out signals al
producing cheques and cashing before the real ones were distributed.
This ain't the old days. The technology has improved to the point where
brute-force hacking attacks are simply not worth the trouble outside of
spy-vs-spy stuff. Social engineering is the most common and effective
means to compromise security.
The US Congress passed a law that no receiver could receive cell phones (cell
phone blocked etc), but that does not stop those who so want to.
Actually, the technology has taken care of most of that. Old cell phones
were analog -- essentially an FM radio transmitter/receiver. New cell
phones communicate digitally using Code Division Multiplexing. The
signal is scrambled and then encoded so that it is smeared over a range
of frequencies and actually below the noise level. The phone companies
and the CIA have technology to hack into it, but it's expensive.
So what I am saying is, be very careful when using wireless, you donot know who
can receive it.
Chris
1. Reset your SSID to something other than the default. Use something
like the Mozilla Secure Password Generator extension to create a nice
random SSID 32 characters long (the maximum), mixed case letters,
digits, and punctuation.
2. Disable the SSID broadcast (it should be disabled by default).
3. Reset the channel to something other than the default (usually 6).
4. Enable WPA Pre-shared Key. Once again, construct a nice random key up
to 63 characters in length.
5. Enable MAC address filtering. The MAC address is hard-wired into all
network products and the filtering will only allow those devices that
you designate to access your network.
Is this 100% absolutely secure? No. But it's damn close. And you've now
made it hard enough for someone to hack your wireless network that the
bad guys are just going to move on to find an easier target.
Rod
