Those not using “Infrastructure Mode”, and configured to transfer data directly machine to machine, or “Ad-Hoc“, should be aware of of the following security problems. Ad-Hoc networking allows you to communicate with other wireless Ethernet systems directly without the need of a wireless access point. This Ad-Hoc peer to peer configuration works well, however the problem is that people tend to just set it up and forget about it. Whilst at home this may not pose any problem, travelling could cause you many security problems.

Classic examples of this lack of security using an Ad-Hoc wifi environment may be found among the many commuters traveling to work by train or even aeroplane, using their laptops to catch up with their daily tasks whilst transiting to or from the office.Those laptops able to use an Ad-Hoc WiFi network can be identified by other local computers with WiFi ability.

It is quite possible to see another laptop’s wireless Ethernet availability and access it’s hard drive by using the comand structure

“net use * <”file://\\otherlaptopIPAddress\C$”>\\otherlaptopIPAddress\C$” ” /USER:administrator”.

You will get confirmation of successfull connection and a network link to it’s C drive. This will be entirely possible when there is a lack of security on any laptop computer starting with securing it’s computer’s local administrator account which often has no password configured.

Data that you may have forgotten about but which could be viewable to the public could be your customer business listings or even your personal finances and banking information.

The fact is, whether it be “Infrastructure Mode”, or “Ad-Hoc” wireless communications, if not properly configured and secured, can and will pose a major security risk.

So, If your are using wireless Ethernet, no matter what configuration, follow these few rules and keep yourself secure against most common types of security failures.

• Use strong passwords, especially those that have administrative control over your system.
• Use some sort of wireless encryption – anything is better than nothing.
• Where possible, use MAC addresses filtering to restrict unwanted systems from attaching to your wireless network.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Secure Shell or SSH works in two main ways. Firstly it gives authentication and encryption on any files that you send and secondly it provides compression on these same files. Both of these help you securely send data to another network.

SSH has come on leaps and bounds since it was first discovered back in 1995. The first version of SSH was developed by Tatu Ylonen at the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland. He decided to design something after his university network was compromised by individuals hacking into students passwords. The freeware version was first released in July 1995 and managed to gain over 20,000 in its first 6 months.

Now a days SSH protocol is even more widely used and can be found in software such as UNIX, Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac and Linux.

Reasons that you may need to use SSH include:

-          Replacing RSH to execute single commands on a remote host

-          Replacing Telnet and rlogin to log into a remote host

-          Copying files to a remote host from a local server

-          Alternative to FTP file transfer

-          Tunneling or forwarding a port

-          To securely have a remote server as a file-system on a local computer

These are just some of the reasons that you may have to use an SSH. Thankfully since its development in 1995 it has improved vastly with many more features for a variety of secure data sending reasons.

Sending data across the internet can be risky. Whether it is files, passwords or other data information you could be at risk from hacking attacks. Some of the ways that people hack are like checking for your password, reading your sensitive information, hijacking messages and emails, taking messages and modifying them and many other ways. Of course you must do everything you can to prevent and protect these attacks from happening to your data and by using SSH you can do just that!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.