What's New: Retail Wi-Fi Wide Open, Study Finds

AirDefense surveyed 3,000 retail stores in the U.S. and Europe for their "2007 Retail Shopping Wireless Security Survey" and determined that out of 2,500 wireless devices such as laptops and barcode scanners detected, 85 percent of these were wide open to hacking. Some wireless networks were set up using default device settings with little or no encryption or default passwords. Out of 5,000 access points found, 25% were not encrypted at all, and another 25% used Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), considered a poor encryption method. Security experts recommend using Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) or WPA2 instead of WEP.

Tuesday, Nov 20, 2007 01:14 pm CST

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