For Now, Wi-Fi Is A Hacker's Delight
You’ve heard of a drive-by shooting, but maybe not drive-by hacking. It’s a worrisome sort of cybercrime in which burglars sit in a car outside a company and use laptop computers with antennas to hack into cash registers and corporate records by snagging data as they travel over the airwaves. That’s how two men allegedly snatched the credit-card numbers of customers of a Lowe’s Home Improvement (LOW ) store in Southfield, Mich., recently. Another mobile thief pleaded guilty just before the holidays to hacking into patient records at Wake Internal Medicine Consultants Inc. in Raleigh, N.C. — just to show how vulnerable such records are to hackers. It happens all the time, according to network security experts. Thanks to the booming popularity of Wi-Fi networks — which let untethered laptop users gain access to the Net from the living room, the airport lounge, or a parked car — keeping such networks secure has become one of the technology industry’s biggest problems. Full Story