Warbiking tour reveals dismal state of wireless security

In this podcast, recorded at Infosecurity Europe 2014, James Lyne, Global Head of Security Research at Sophos, talks about how he took his computer-equipped bicycle onto the streets of several cities to test how safe homes, businesses, and even people on mobile phones are from cyber criminals.

Conventional wireless network security is still a major concern, despite the security industry assuming such issues had been resolved years ago. Many would assume these methods are “old hat’ but it is still a very viable attack vector that demonstrates basic security best practice is not being adopted.

London was the latest stop on the “World of Warbiking” tour – a global research project targeting major cities across the globe. Conducted over two days around the streets of the capital, Lyne’s warbiking exercise revealed that of 81,743 networks surveyed, some 29.5 percent were using either the known-broken WEP algorithm, or no security encryption at all. A further 52 percent of networks were using WPA – a no longer recommended security algorithm.

Listen to the podcast here.