Securing a Wireless Network

[birchw]

Hi, I was wondering what the best way is to secure a wireless network - on my network I have employed mac address filtering and 128 bit WEP encryption... but I've heard a lot of stories that WEP is quite easy to hack, and WPA is better?

I look forward to a reply.

Thanks.

[Cyberdyne]

Once you employ mac address filtering and WEP its pretty secure, but if you want to go further you can buy higher priced hardware with higher security, but unless you are a big firm there is really no need for this.

Good Luck, Cyber.

[nosipho]

Hi, I was wondering what the best way is to secure a wireless network - on my network I have employed mac address filtering and 128 bit WEP encryption... but I've heard a lot of stories that WEP is quite easy to hack, and WPA is better?

I look forward to a reply.

Thanks.

yes WPA is much better than WEP but WEP is fine too, it's not that easy to hack it at all.

[birchw]

Thanks guys.

[Cyberdyne]

Welcome, good luck on your home networking!

Cyber

[Motoma]

yes WPA is much better than WEP but WEP is fine too, it's not that easy to hack it at all.

I think everyone here could benefit from reading this article.

[Cyberdyne]

Motoma this is a great article, now if it fall in the wrong hands is a different story =)

Cyber.

[Motoma]

Motoma this is a great article, now if it fall in the wrong hands is a different story =)

Cyber.

Yeah, it was big news last year, when the FBI went to display how insecure the system was, it took them 3 minutes to crack the encryption...th ey were expecting 15. The crowd was stunned.

[Cyberdyne]

Yeah, although I wonder how long will it take them with the new mac address filtering, 256bit encryption and new WEP. You know we were actually talking about it here at UCLA and the reality is that the FBI are linked to NSA and they have other tools which will crack any wireless network in seconds. remember that the NSA is always ahead of us 5 to 10 years in tech.

Cyber.

[Motoma]

Yeah, although I wonder how long will it take them with the new mac address filtering, 256bit encryption and new WEP. You know we were actually talking about it here at UCLA and the reality is that the FBI are linked to NSA and they have other tools which will crack any wireless network in seconds. remember that the NSA is always ahead of us 5 to 10 years in tech.

Cyber.

MAC address filtering is nothing.

I think that any attempt by birchw to secure his wireless network against the NSA would be futile to begin with.

However, hardening it against the LiveCD hacking distros shouldn't be that difficult, if you follow a few guidelines.

[Cyberdyne]

Yeah best bet would be to pull the plug =)

[cyberking]

Yeah best bet would be to pull the plug =)

You could use 802.1x with WPA psk.