Recently in the news a guy in Germany managed to hack into a WiFi network protected with WPA encryption. He used the cloud computing service provided by Amazon. It took him 20 minutes of brute force attack but he thinks he can speed it up to 6 minutes! It cost him all of $1.68 in server time! Ouch!
Here's the article from PCWorld.com
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/216434/cloud_computing_used_to_hack_wireless_passwords.html
After I heard that, I enabled MAC filtering on my home network. Not that I think any of my neighbors are capable of hacking into my network, but just for the principle. And after Google was caught gathering home WiFi information while they do their Google Map drive by's, maybe I'm not being so paranoid after all...
If you plan to enable MAC filtering on your home network, remember that you have to list ALL of your network interfaces. When I first did it, I assumed it was only the wireless devices that needed to be listed. After all, if you're physically present in my house and connected to my network through a network cable, I think network security is the least of my worries. But it turns out that anything that has a network interface and a MAC address that you connect to your router, needs to be listed. I was surprised by how many entries were in my list when I was done!
No comments:
Post a Comment