Building a Private Infrastructure

In the majority of cases, when companies build their wireless infrastructure they often fail to account for privacy concerns. Security is often an afterthought, and by then it is a simple and easy matter for someone with a laptop and wireless NIC to use freely available software to roam directly onto your wireless network and have almost unlimited access to your entire intranet.

Wireless users are more sophisticated as they look for ways to compromise the privacy of your wireless network. The most common tools include "sniffers" that can listen to the network to get user passwords and steal confidential documents transmitted directly from your e-mail server. These actions are no less than corporate espionage. The most common attack is from people who understand the building blocks of your network and sit just outside your building, roam onto your wireless network from their cars, and record all your network activity.

Items to Compromise

What does a hacker look for when he monitors your network? In the majority of cases, he looks for information that he can use, sell, or modify for his own purposes. These include:

• Credit card numbers
• Passwords
• Documents
• Social security numbers
• Incoming and outgoing e-mail
• Private/internal Web sites on your intranet
• Any file on your server that is accessible within your intranet

Unsecure access points are the most vulnerable areas, and they are most often attacked. This is the one element of your wireless infrastructure that is most often configured improperly. Attacks on various access points are mounted so that private information transmitted over your wireless infrastructure can be acquired.