WiFi Security

Wireless Security is nothing but prevention of unauthorized access or damage to computers using wireless networks. Wireless networks are very common now-a-days both for organization and individuals as many laptop computers have wireless cards pre- installed. Due to the benefit of using network while mobile have increased the cause of system vulnerable by the hackers.

Cracking of data or information and having access to the system has become more popular now-a-days as it is easy to crack with the easy-to-use windows and Linux based tools.

Threats to the system due to WiFi: As we use wireless networks now-a-days there is lot of possibilities of threats like accidental association, malicious association, Identity theft, man-in-middle attack, Denial of service (DOS) attack. This all attacks are related to the networking aspect used while using the wireless technologies. In accidental association the access point of the computer or laptop becomes the target for the attacker where the information like passwords can be obtained and the attacker can plant a Trojan in the computer. In Identity theft or MAC Spoofing attack the attacker is able to crack the MAC address by listening to the network traffic and obtains the network privilege of that system. Man-in-middle attack occurs when the soft Access Point is vulnerable.

Prevention Measures to avoid WiFi Breach: MAC ID filtering can be used on the systems to avoid any kind of soft access point, where MAC ID filtering allows the administrator to only permit access to computers that have wireless functionalities that contain certain MAC IDs. Static IP addressing is one of the prevention methods for securing the wireless network where an IP address is disabled atleast for the assignment function of the network’s DHCP server. By doing so the attacker cannot have access to the network as the IP addresses of various network devices are set by hand. Wired Equivalent Privacy WEP uses encryption standard for securing the wireless networks.