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Like most advances, wireless LANs and WWANs pose both opportunities and risks. The technology can represent a powerful complement to an enterprise’s networking capabilities, enabling increased employee productivity and reducing IT costs. To minimize the attendant risks, IT administrators can implement a range of measures, including establishment of wireless security policies and practices, as well as implementation of various LAN and WAN design and implementation measures. Finally, achieving this balance of opportunity and risk allows enterprises to confidently implement wireless LANs and realize the benefits this increasingly viable technology offers.

In this chapter, you’ve discovered how to find wireless networks, gain access to them even if they’re using WEP encryption, find vulnerable systems and ports, and use various utilities to assist you in those endeavors. This is mostly what a hacker would do to gain access to your systems. Finally, by knowing your hacker, you can then successfully implement strategies to circumvent these methods.

Secure wireless networks can be deployed quickly and cost effectively once the architecture and hardware are procured. However, complexity increases as the amount of serviceable users and coverage area grows. When users must “roam” between different access points, new criteria enter into the equation, due to the complexities involved in configuring a wireless network that provides users the mobility they desire. Finally, when these factors are taken into consideration, a wireless network can be designed with appropriate countermeasures, to provide both mobility and security for wireless networks in hostile environments.

Wireless software applications can realize a level of security that satisfies the needs of most enterprises, assuming you plan effective solutions and have security policies in place that enforce conformance to security mechanisms. Keep in mind, however, that the strongest authentication and data encryption won’t keep a hacker from merely looking over the shoulder of someone using a wireless device in a public place. So don’t forget to educate users on this simple hacker tactic as well as the more sophisticated ones.

It is unclear where this debate is headed and how it will be resolved. It is important to remember that patients’ needs are quite different from the research community’s when it comes to clinical trial registries. The patient is interested in the number of different trials, the enrollment criteria, and the geographical proximity of the trial site so that he/she can make a decision about whether the trial is of potential interest. These are a mere subset of the 20 data elements that are under discussion and have little bearing on the transparency of clinical research that the remaining data elements are designed to address. p ]Finally, the role of the FDA must be fully recognized for what it is, an impartial review of all the data required to support a marketing application. Those who castigate the pharmaceutical industry indirectly impugn the integrity of the FDA. Pharmaceutical industry clinical research goes forward with the full knowledge that trial design and results will be critically examined. A product will not be licensed for marketing nor will an advertising claim be permitted unless the data support it.

In IEEE 802.11 networks, the Service Set Identifier (SSID) is viewed by some security professionals as an unneeded advertisement of the wireless network to attackers and these professionals assert that all measures should be taken to hide the SSID. But this advertisement is the essential role that SSIDs are designed to play. The broadcast of the SSID improves the performance of a wireless network and the SSID cannot be hidden without degrading proper WLAN operations. Finally, efforts to hide the SSID are at best half-measures which lead to a false sense of security and to a degradation of wireless network performance, particularly in a roaming situation.”

With the proliferation of broadband access worldwide, remote access is becoming more prevalent in increasingly mission critical applications for the competitive enterprise. Cable modems and xDSL access are making remote office/telecommuting an increasingly viable and useful scenario for individual subscribers. Similarly, the dramatic increase in the availability of public wireless LANs (802.11) is enabling mobile workers to stay connected to the enterprise network at broadband speeds. Securing these client sessions and protecting intellectual property is clearly a key enterprise requirement, and IPSec defines the architecture for this security. However, equipment costs, scaling issues, and administrative overhead have made deployment and ongoing management of remote access by the enterprise problematic. This enterprise pain point presents service providers with an opportunity — to offer a managed secure remote access service.

Service providers can now use IPSec secure remote access services as a foundation for a value-added services portfolio. Finally, these providers can now offer IPSec secure remote access to customers who desire this critical service, but do not want to provide the equipment and stafing requirements themselves.

Secure wireless networks can be deployed quickly and cost effectively once the architecture and hardware are procured. However, complexity increases as the amount of serviceable users and coverage area grows. When users must “roam” between different access points, new criteria enter into the equation, due to the complexities involved in configuring a wireless network that provides users the mobility they desire. Finally, when these factors are taken into consideration, a wireless network can be designed with appropriate countermeasures, to provide both mobility and security for wireless networks in hostile environments.

As wireless LAN technology continues to proliferate, wireless LAN users will increasingly call upon help desk resources to report wireless network issues. Fortunately, technicians no longer need to carry several tools in order to test and troubleshoot their networks. Integrated wirelesslwired portable analyzers can quickly isolate problems to the wireless or wired network, client device, or application, enabling technicians to accelerate problem resolution.

Wireless analyzers discover network-connected devices and provide information regarding their associated health, signal strength, and security configurations. They also have the ability to operate as a wireless client which helps technicians to immediately determine whether the issue is specific to the given user’s device. Finally, portable, integrated network analyzers have performance advantages over laptops, multimode scanning advantages over handhelds, and cost and granularity advantages over centralized systems.

It is very likely that the IEEE and other enterprises will continue to find ways to improve the security of wireless technology. Because this technology is becoming so popular and widespread, the technological community cannot afford for it to continue to be as insecure as it presently is. Though new problems may come out in 802.11i, the wireless industry can be confident that security will be continuously improved until it is at least comparable with that of wired networks. Not only that, but it should allow for both security and the convenience and mobility that makes wireless attractive. The world is quite possibly moving towards a wireless state. Before that happens, these serious security issues must be addressed. Finally, as this technology is too important to give up on, you can rest assured that it will be continuously improved until the security reaches an acceptable level.