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Waking up to wireless

14 May 2007 2 comments

Paul Penrose

Head of Research

Finextra

The WSJ has reported that the hackers who made off with the credit and debit card details of 45 million shoppers at TJX, initially breached the firm’s perimeter defences through an insecure wireless network. TJX has yet to confirm the report, but according to the WSJ, opportunistic hackers used a laptop and an antenna to intercept data moving wirelessly between hand-held price checking units and store computers and cash registers at a Marshall’s clothing store in Minnesota. The data they got from this enabled them to crash the central database of parent company TJX.

It seems that the compromised wireless network was ‘protected’ using WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) encryption, one of the weakest forms of Wi-Fi security that can be cracked in as little as three seconds.

Given the proliferation of wireless access points to financial institutions, it might be an appropriate moment to dust off those old WiFi security policies and triple-check defences. A break-in on the TJX scale would be enough to finish off any bank.

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Comments: (2)

A Finextra member

15 May 2007

A scary item here on The Register about how WEP is hackable in around two minutes. Oh dear.

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Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

15 May 2007

2 minutes or 3 seconds -- either way, it's a short enough time that someone could sit with their laptop within range of your network and compromise the security without raising suspicion. All security-conscious organisations with wireless networks should be using WPA encryption with a RADIUS server.

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Paul Penrose

Head of Research

Finextra

Member since

06 Oct 2006

Location

London

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