Digital Prank

The popularity of WIFI across our homes, office, Internet cafes have increased quite a lot and you can find a WIFI hotspot wherever you go in almost all the developed countries and in some developing nations. WIFI security over the years have developed and security have been tightened when people started switching from WEP encryption to WPA and WPA2. But still WIFI networks are completely under the black hat peoples scrutiny. Today I am going to discuss about the common problems and solutions without getting into too much of technical.

WIFI networks mostly use WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA,WPA2) as security protocols to encrypt their data. Out of all the methodologies WEP is the least secured security protocol and one can N number of tutorials across the Internet to crack it. Most of the old router devices use only WEP and there is always a possibility that your neighbor can hack in and use your bandwidth and plant some Trojan in your laptop or computer to steal information. Most of the intruders use Backtrack Auditor security tools to exploit the vulnerability of the WIFI networks. WEP cracking doesn’t need an expertise and it is nothing but set of procedures that will do the job.

WPA and WPA2 gives a higher level of security compared to WEP but still the security can be undone if the password is really weak. If any dictionary words are used as passwords then WPA or WPA2  remains vulnerable and can be cracked. So I am here to give few tips about how to keep your WIFI networks safe.

1. Use WPA or WPA2 encryption to secure your wireless networks.

2. If your device supports only WEP then you can enable MAC address filtering, change default router passwords and switch off your router when not in use. Other techniques like changing SSID and disabling SSID broadcast will not do much and cannot solve our problem.

3. If you are using WPA or WPA2 use strong passwords to your wireless networks. Do not use passwords that are dictionary words. You can make use of online password generators to create some strong passwords.

4. Always install firewall and anti-virus with updates in your PC.

Tracking the WIFI intruders is possible using tools like MoocherHunter (Wireless Auditing tool) and directional antennas only if the intruder is live in your system. I tried using the tool without directional antenna and find it quite interesting and can really track down carrying your laptop and pointing it in the right direction which is quite complicated in an apartment. Hope you should find this article useful and please leave your comments if you like it.