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WiFi Cracking

Ever since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the wireless networking industry has developed from its humble beginnings as an extra gimmick for mobile device marketing to a veritable and viable commercial innovation. It only takes fifty dollars for anyone to setup a WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) of their own. It's plug-and-play, straightforward, and affordable; however, WiFi cracking remains a major problem because very few people can comprehend how their information is being sent to the Internet without the assistance of wires, much less understand the associated risks of using this technology.

At the time of this writing, as much as half or about two-fifths of all wireless users are not implementing any form of security measure on their WLAN because, obviously, they want to setup their WiFi connection as soon as possible without even bothering to protect themselves from potential cyber security hazards.The good news is that more and more people are adopting protocols to protect their network setups regardless, albeit there's still a long way to go before wireless protection becomes universal. The bad news is that this security dilemma is worsened by the fact that early attempts at encryption and transmission privacy were met with disastrous results and continuous failure.

The firewall was eventually implemented as an additional defense against any and all potential invaders by filtering inbound and outbound WiFi traffic, but that proved futile as well because any attacker that's been authenticated and associated by an access point can gain unrestrained access to all computers and internal servers, firewall or no firewall.The Access Control List (ACL) was then made to enable administrators to predefine the Ethernet MAC addresses of each client that's allowed to authenticate and associate as well as block off suspicious attempts to authenticate by outsiders. Simply put, wireless network security is a continuous cycle of escalation with no end in sight.

Perhaps it's because WiFi was designed to be so exposed (i.e., flawed by design because its limited by the boundaries of its own signal, such that cars, nearby buildings, parks, and streets can all serve as a virtual port to it), or maybe it's because most free public Internet is wireless (which essentially allows it to be accessed by all users, even particularly malicious ones seeking to wreak havoc on unsuspecting prey), but whatever the reason, wireless networks are so frighteningly easy to crack that using it is like playing a game of Russian roulette with your WiFi-enabled device's wellbeing.

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