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Home > WiFi 24 June 2004 Research into the development of wireless networking in four of Europe’s main financial centres has exposed a series of alarming loopholes that is leaving many businesses open to crippling data security breaches. Approximately 34 per cent of businesses are making fundamental security mistakes resulting in unprotected wireless traffic, according to research by RSA Security. Thr research conducted in London, Paris, Frankfurt and Milan reveals that wireless network adoption is prolific. Confirmation of this rapid growth is found in the massive expansion seen in London over the last three years, where wireless networks have grown by 770 per cent since 2001. However businesses are not meeting security best practice guidelines. Although issues exist with the WEP encryption standard, a worryingly high proportion of businesses had not even configured their networks to reach the basic security levels. A daunting 72 per cent of access points in Milan were unencrypted; 41 per cent were unencrypted in Frankfurt; and in Paris and London, where the best encryption levels were found, still one third of all access points featured no encryption. Organisations are also failing to heed the dangers of leaving wireless networks’ default settings unaltered. This can lead to the organisation’s name or geographical location being broadcasted and acting as bait to a would-be-hacker. 39 per cent of all access points in Paris still displayed default values; this rose to nearly half of all access points in Milan, with Frankfurt showing around 33 per cent of all access points. The lowest was London with 25 per cent still displaying default values – however this is unsurprising because of the widespread exposure that ‘drive-by hacking’ has received in the UK during the last three years. The surveys have also revealed evidence of the rapid adoption of the new 802.11g wireless network specification – the latest interoperable standard to deliver improved security, additional speed and stability to wireless networks. Here, the Milanese are a step ahead of their European counterparts, with one in three of all networks using the new specification. In Frankfurt, just one in seven networks use the 802.11g technology; in London and Paris, the ratio was one in four. An encouraging trend drawn from the London surveys, and seen to a lesser extent in the other European research, is the number of businesses starting to use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) as an alternative to the flawed wireless encryption protocols. The highest percentage was in London where 19 per cent of unencrypted access points (where no WEP was found) were using VPNs; in Frankfurt 11 per cent of unencrypted access points had implemented a VPN; Paris saw 5 per cet; and the lowest was Milan with only 2 per cent of networks with no WEP deploying VPNs. Buckley concludes: “Encrypting network traffic and strongly-authenticating users should be second nature to businesses of all sizes, and deploying a VPN is an easy way of achieving this. Unauthorised users can – and do – access poorly protected wireless LANs and once they are connected they can do whatever they like. This not only instantly negates the effort and investment organisations have made in other areas to secure the corporate infrastructure, but a security breach such as this can hit an organisation’s reputation and bottom-line and may result in litigation.”
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