Absolutely nothing personal!
But PLEASE. I love the moron media that brings up insta-paranoia with stupidity like this - "you are unsafe with WEP"
The average home user has not much to worry about regarding "easy to break" WEP. What?
(talking to the media now
) - a hacker is going to go around a little residential communty to seek out hidden SSID's, find the MAC address to bypass the MAC filter lock, then stand there for the
15GB of data transmit to build the key crack table
http://www.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu/isaac/wep-faq.html
just to see if something worthwhile is behind the
residential firewalls?
Yeah, right...
I love blind sheepdom. Media makes a claim and everyone is suppopsed to follow lock-step without using even a touch of brain matter to figure things out for yourself.
Yes, WEP can be cracked. Is the
average home user much at risk?
No. The "hacker" has a lot better things to do with his time than stand there and try to crack into a tiny home network. If you are going to stand there and build the key tables or XOR the collisions are you going to go after a home network or a corporate one?
The WEP issue is a real issue for businesses dealing with sensitive materials - a hacker probably isn't even going to try to break into a WEP WiFi field of a land surveyor, for instance, because of lack of perceived booty. What is he going to find, the latest figures on the Johnson house?
So the vast majority of WEP attacks are aimed against upscale targets that will provide some type of reward - informational or monetary - in relation to the effort expended.
In other words, a good portion of home users worrying about WEP cracking are wasting their time in the worry.
If you are not going to file share via WiFi to the laptop / HPC then simply build the wired part of the system - the desktops and hard-wired laptops - on the IPX protocol, which
cannot be routed over the WiFi network (unless you take an active role in doing so, installing IPX/TCP wrapping protocols
). Then, in Windows, unbind the TCP protocol from the Windows network stack. On the laptop unbind the TCP and file sharing from the wireless adapter.
Bingo, instant security - even if they do break through the router's security firewalls they will see...nothing. With the TCP disconnected the WiFi system will get no routable NetBIOS calls and therefore, to the hacker, it will appear that absolutely nothing will be behind the firewall he just broke into. No computers at all; no a single computer will acknowledge a file sharing NetBIOS call.
Sorry.
Just had to get that off my chest. I've seen so much "WEP" issues but only a select few of the arguments actually bother to say "But, really, for home use...". People just have better things to do than to break a WEP home network, usually.
Edited by Snake 2006-02-22 9:52 AM
(yes takwu, finally something that only 4.2 has 
) but i may be wrong!