Day: April 6, 2007

WEP is “Wired Equivalent Privacy” and is available in most wireless routers. It has long been easy to crack. However, new hacking techniques can now crack it in under 60 seconds! Ouch!

The Final ‘Final’ Nail in WEP’s Coffin?

“Researchers have discovered a new way of attacking Wired Equivalent Privacy that requires an amount of data ‘more than an order of magnitude’ less than the best known key-recovery attacks. In effect, the cracking can be done within a minute, as the title of the paper suggests: Breaking 104 bit WEP in less than 60 seconds. Specifically, only 40,000 data packets are needed for a 50 percent chance of success, while 85,000 packets give a 95 percent chance of success, according to the paper’s authors: Erik Tews, Ralf-Philipp Weinmann and Andrei Pyshkin, all researchers in the computer science department at Darmstadt University of Technology in Darmstadt, Germany. The ease of cracking WEP is nothing new; cryptanalysts showed six years ago that any WEP key can be cracked with readily available software in one minute or less. The protocol, which is part of the IEEE 802.11 wireless networking standard, was superseded by WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) in 2003, then by WPA2, another name for the full IEEE 802.11i standard. What’s new that has been missing from WEP cracking until now is that a Wi-Fi attacker no longer needs long periods of time nor much smarts, according to Wi-Fi security experts. ‘…To crack WEP [up until now] it 1) required a knowledgeable attacker [and] 2) took a long time,’ said Andrea Bittau, in an e-mail exchange. Bittau is a research fellow at the University College London and a co-author of a paper describing what had been the most effective WEP cracking technique prior to the Germans’ research.”

So… bottom line, use WPA (“Wi-Fi Protected Access”) or WPA2 and be safe!

Now, I am no “typical” computer user. I know better than to download warez and evil files. I don’t click on e-mail attachments… ever! And, in my 28 years of computer experience, I have never had a computer virus hit MY system! Until yesterday. I still haven’t had one on any of my personal computers… but at work, yesterday afternoon, I when to a very bland, ordinary web site. The next thing I know, my system was shouting about a virus… and I had 122 files infected. We use Sophos Anti-virus at work, and it caught it and stopped it dead. But… it was embarrassing! Me! Me, the Doctor, get a computer virus? Why that is unthinkable… totally ridiculous! But, it finally happened. And, as I have been thinking about it, it makes me mad!

I was one of those kids in school that had a perfect attendance record for years! I mark records like that… I was proud of my “I’ve never had a virus” status. Now, boom! It is shot! Any why? Not because of stupid downloads or stupid clicking on attachments… no, it is because of a very ordinary, innocuous web site that had a mechanism to launch a virus attack. Now, let me say, my system is always fully patched… and up to date on all virus signatures and security patches. And, it didn’t cause my system at work any “damage.” Other than to my pride. Sigh.

To my view, we have entered a new age… an age in which even the most computer savvy among us can, indeed, get a virus… there are just too many sites out there that have these “built-in” attack systems. It is a clarion call to be more vigilant, and more serious about computer security.

And I am giving serious thought to adding virus writing to the list of capital offenses. OK, maybe… maybe, that is overkill. Maybe.