Hackers have changed a great deal as far as their approach is concerned. They are becoming more and more sophisticated each day and making use of some of the most thought-bred effective tools that guarantee complete attack and kill! It does set the alarm bells ringing for the traditional folk, however, if you have your basics right and working, you can at least prolong the inevitable. Here are 4 things you should know that wireless hackers hope you don't!
1.WEP encryption
Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is essentially useless as a protection mechanism. WEP is easily cracked within minutes even by the most mediocre of hackers out there. Those of you who were under the contention that WEP was really safe, well, think again! It is high time that you set your wireless routers up and change your wireless encryption from WEP to WPA2 security which is new and much stronger.
2.Wireless router's MAC filter
Majority of routers out there will allow you to permit/deny access based on an IP-based hardware's unique hard-coded MAC address. The router tends to compare the MAC address of the network device with a list of permitted/denied MACs that you've provided. Now, while it's good to trust yourself (since you're the one providing the address and all), however, for a hacker forging a fake MAC address that matches a genuine one is like a walk in the park. Using one of the many wireless packet capture programmes they can effectively sniff on your wireless traffic and view which MAC addresses are traversing the network. The rest is pretty much the usual stuff!
3.Wireless router's remote administration feature
While your wireless router's remote administration feature gives you unobstructed access to all of your router's security settings and other features without you having to sit on a computer that is plugged into it using an Ethernet cable, there is one 'big' problem here which makes the feature all the more dangerous and hacker-friendly. The remote administration feature can be taken advantage of by a hacker who once gaining entry could easily change all your security settings as per his will. If you're one of those who never change the factory default admin passwords to their wireless router, well, you seriously are looking for some trouble. Instead you can turn off the "allow admin via wireless" feature so that only those having physical access to your network can administer the settings.
4.Public hotspots
Public/free hotspots are the harbinger of "man-in-the-middle" attacks. Using tools like Firesheep, a hacker could easily place himself/herself in the 'middle' of a wireless conversation between sender and receiver thereby stealing your passwords, reading your e-mail etc. Furthermore, tools like SSL Strip can help them obtain passwords for secure websites that you visit.
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