Great Googly Moogly
Posted by Chris Roeckl, VP Marketing at AirMagnet
Date: May 12, 2010
Google reportedly has plans to sniff out the world's WLANs in order to put them on a map and make them easier to find for consumers.
The report from Germany, and reported on newfactor.com (http://www.newsfactor.com/news/You-Can-t-Hide-WLANs-from-Google/story.xhtml?story_id=0230029FFNG7&full_skip=1), has consumer advocate groups up in arms and encourages the need to secure WLANs using WPA2. The article falters (and gives poor advice) when it goes on to say that hidden SSIDs will do the trick for amateur security - but we all know how truly lame that is, right?
I'll admit that I have a hidden SSID network at my house with cruddy WEP encyption. It's my "underlay" network b/g for streaming music, legacy devices, iPhones and my teen-age son's friends who show up with their various WiFi gizmos. My main "overlay" network, however, is 11n at 5GHz and that's super secure. But, my lamely secure network is not segregated from my other 11n and gigabit core network, allowing a hacker to compromise the lame network and freely grab data off my home servers. Uh oh!
As they say, first you have to admit there's a problem. And, yes, I will fix it. Anybody else out there need an intervention to admit their WLAN security is less than perfect? In all seriousness though, there's no stopping Google's WLAN mapping project. Perhaps that's good news, since it highlights the fact that their is no security shortcuts when it comes to WLAN security. Want to chat more — our lines are open 24x7.
UPDATE: It appears Google has decided to stop its Street View cars from sniffing wireless networking data after an embarrassing privacy issue. The company revealed Friday that Street View vehicles had been sniffing the content of users' Internet communications on open wireless networks, despite the company's earlierstatements to the contrary. Read a good update at http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/051410-google-stops-sniffing-wi-fi-data.html?source=NWWNLE_nlt_daily_am_2010-05-17
Chris Roeckl is the VP of Marketing at AirMagnet. Prior to AirMagnet, Roeckl served in executive roles at Fortinet, Infoblox, NetScreen Technologies and Inverse Network Technologies. He has also served as a technology analyst for the Robert Frances Group and as the editor for CommunicationsWeek.