WEP Security Alert

[lassiter]

Originally Posted by oast

The FBI demonstration (conducted over a year ago, BTW) used exagerted traffic loads to break the code in 3 minutes. Traffic FAR beyond the norm of a household or even small business. The amount of "normal" data that needs to be 'sniffed' to get access to a network would take hours (maybe days on a slower-moving, average, home network).

A teen hacker running the right brute-force software on his hijacked network of 10,000+ unfirewalled PCs could probably accomplish the task fairly quickly.

Ever looked at raw weblogs of a hacker attack? One hacker running a brute force password attempt on one of my (now-defunct) paysites was sending around 1,000 hits per minute, nonstop for around 36 hours, from several thousand different IPs worldwide. You don't need to be parked outside with a single laptop - you just need the target IP address and a network of compromised machines aimed at it.