Branding David

I have always been told to secure my wireless connection, and while I have never enjoyed the idea of locking everything down due to the various issues that pop up with wireless devices, I have worried about the security of my data and what that means for both my personal life and my business.

Locking down your wireless Internet connection has always been relatively easy, but could it soon be a waste of time? A great report that I recently read talked about how graphics cards for computers could be used to crack the highest security connection passwords on wireless Internet connections in one ten thousandth of the time it traditionally takes to do so.

A dedicated person with the right equipment could access your wireless connection in minutes or hours rather than the previous assumption of days or weeks. The barrier for entry is also getting lower with the equipment costing less and less as new releases cycle out nearly every quarter.

David Hobson, managing director of Global Secure Systems has recently said that, “brute force decryption of the WPA and WPA2 systems using parallel processing has been on the theoretical possibilities horizon for some time – and presumably employed by relevant government agencies in extreme situations – but the use of the latest nVidia cards to speedup decryption on a standard PC is extremely worrying.”

If you are not using a VPN for your business based wireless Internet connections, then you might as well consider yourself open to attacks and data mining.

Maybe it is time to go back to using wired connections, or finding ways to strictly limit wireless connections by making them only available inside of buildings, and using only computers with certain MAC addresses among other basic security implementations that go above and beyond just enabling one of the types of encryption.