I'm doing some work at a clients house when one of their sons asks if I could hook his PSP to the family network. I've never messed with a PSP but I figured if it's wireless it should be the same basic principle as other wireless gear. His mother told me Geek Squad told him they would come out and and connect it to the network.....for $80! I was waiting for one of the systems to reboot so I grabbed hold and went to town. First the Geeks set up the wireless network with security (which was a good idea) but (bad idea) it was 64bit WEP. Sixty......four......double you ee pee. First mistake. Second, the password into the network they set up was in the top ten worst passwords you can use. Now trying to give the Squad some credit I checked the router security to see if 64 was the peak of its protection. No. WPA2. So instead of using a highly encrypted safe scheme Geek Squad decided to use the easiest password with the lightest encryption. Why they even chose to filter the MACs I'll never know. Oh and they broadcast the SSID. Nice. So remember:
Strong password (you don't write down)
WEP Encryption
Turn off broadcasting the SSID
Filter MACS
Turn it off when not using it.
1 comment:
tip for you :)
by enabling MAC filtering, you disable your WEP. MAC filtering overrides WEP. If you have both enabled, and i grab a mac address floating around the network (which is the first byte in every packet sent out) with a simple promiscuous packet sniffer, i dont need your WEP key. Just a tip. I kind of agree with the rest although, ANY of my clients with ANY type of even slightly sensitive information in their networks will get hard-wired from me.
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