Motorola' AirDefense staff used the company's flagship monitoring software and Wi-Fi card, AirDefense Mobile, to scan, but not penetrate, some 4,000 retail locations in North America, Europe, and this year, also in Australia and Korea, during the latter half of 2008.

The AirDefense scan was the company's second annual survey of wireless security in the retail market. The survey found that only twelve percent of the scanned access points were using Wi-Fi Protected Access, an industry specification based on the then-draft IEEE 802.11i security standard, which was intended to strengthen wireless LAN security.

The scan of WLANs in big city shopping malls found about 44% of some 3,900 client devices detected, including barcode scanners, notebooks PCs and mobile computers, could be compromised, according to Motorola AirDefense CTO Amit Sinha. That percentage is a huge drop from last year's survey, which found 85% of the detected client devices were exposed in various ways.

Retailer access points were better protected: 68% of just over 7,900 access points were using some kind of encryption, leaving nearly one-third of them with no data scrambling at all. That percentage is worse than last year, which found that 35% of the detected access points were wide open. And of those that were encrypted, 25% in the new survey were using Wireless Equivalent Privacy (WEP), a flawed encryption scheme that can be cracked in minutes by a knowledgeable attacker.

Read full article...

Labels: wireless, security, reference