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A Seattle hacking triumvirate has received a collective quarter-century behind bars.
With a combination of wardriving and malware implantation, they made off with $3m plundered from company acco...
The three men, Joshuah Allen Witt, 35, John Earl Griffin, 36, and Brad Eugene Lowe, 39, have all now been given stiff prison terms. Lowe picked up the lightest sentence, ===> with six-and-a-half years, whilst Witt and Griffin were sent down for nearly eight years each.
There are two lessons to be learned here.
The first lesson is to make sure you get your WiFi security right - at work and at home. We've written up some simple guidelines before to help you do the right thing.
To summarise, here are three things which do not provide WiFi security. Two of them provide a touch of safety against inadvertent connections, but none of these protect you against wardrivers:
- WEP encryption. The security system in WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) is flawed and can easily and automatically be cracked. A wardriver will bypass WEP in 60 seconds - and that includes the time taken to park outside your office and boot up his laptop. Use WPA instead.
- MAC address filtering. MAC (Media Access Control) addresses aren't secret. WiFi networks broadcast the MAC addresses of all currently-connected devices, so a wardriver already has a list of addresses he can use.
- SSID hiding. The SSID (Service Set identifier) is your network name. Hiding it merely means your network doesn't openly advertise itself for use. But it isn't a secret - the SSID appears in other network traffic anyway, so the wardriver knows what it is.
The second lesson is to be doubly vigilant after a physical break-in. Don't just look for what's missing, but what might have been left behind.
Read more, a MUST for WiFi protection:
