CWNP - So...imagine yourself in this position

Author

So...imagine yourself in this position

meijin

2003-09-01, 12:06 am

OK...you walk into a new installation that was done by a third party. You are standing on the first floor of a five story building. You stand underneath an AP running on Channel 6. You fire up your spectrum analyzer and you see a total of 5 APs that are all on Channel 6 and can see each other. You bring this to the attention of the vendor that did the install and they are not concerned at all about it.

So, you set up different folks all associated to the different APs on the same channel. They are downloading the same file from the same site at the same time. At the same time, you are running Airopeek NX and doing a wireless sniffer capture. You do a capture for two minutes and end up with almost 3,500 errors...that include broadcast storms, severe broadcast storms, retries, CRC errors and physical errors. You bring this to the attention of the vendor and again...they are not concerned. All though they have official Wi-Fi certification, their response is that they don't even know if Airopeek NX works correctly with their hardware.

Jezzz...just imagine being in that position.

slinthi

2003-09-02, 7:43 pm

Just imagine you’re in this position. You fire off your PDA in a government building and it immediately associates with a wireless network. You discover that the source of the association is a "wireless bridge" that connects two buildings located across a public street together. Later you walk outside to the street with your laptop, fire off etherreal and capture a couple of seconds of wireless traffic, discovering that the traffic is not encrypted.

Imagine immediately reporting the situation to the agency's IT management. Imagine 5 months passes and nothing changes.

I sense a book opportunity. Tales of what “not to do” for wireless networkers……….

Devinator

2003-09-06, 1:10 am

I've seen both of these situations personally and many more just like them. The last time I heard someone tell a story like this, the end-user corporation paid $150/hour for the original install, followed by $450/hr (not kidding) for a re-site survey and re-install. These horror stories, taken in stride, should make you jump for joy at the prospect of making some serious money. ;-) One way to force customers to listen is to use gov't or private-sector regulations such as FIPS, HIPAA, GLB, etc. If the IT Mgr doesn't listen, take it to the CFO (yep, that's the financial officer) - that's one person that WILL listen.

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