In a report titled “Wi-Fi networks extremely vulnerable to terror attacks,” the Economic Times points out that:

The recent incident involving US national Kenneth Haywood, whose Internet Protocol (IP) address was allegedly used to send the terror e-mail prior to the Ahmedabad serial blasts, should be regarded as a wake up call. While this incident of wireless hacking took security agencies by surprise, lakhs of individuals and companies are actually exposed to a similar risk. Incidents of such hacking are common, but go unreported since they may not have such grave implications.

The police version of the Haywood incident, as reported in the newspapers, is that suspected criminals allegedly hacked into the Wi-Fi network of his laptop and used it to send the terror e-mail. Prior to this hacking, Mr Haywood is said to have complained of high browsing bills. If this is to be believed, then one possibility is that Haywoood may have left his access point open. The suspected terrorist could then have hooked on to this access point and sent the email, which then showed Haywood’s IP address as the originator. This is regarded, in hacking terminology, as stealing of bandwidth while impersonating Haywood.

Wi-Fi hacking is an even bigger a problem for companies that have many employees who take their laptops all over the place and might come back infected, or who have a number of access points that can be easy targets if not secured properly. This is the market that Pune-based AirTight Networks is going after:

Hemant Chaskar, Airtight’s technology director, explained: “Companies earlier used firewalls, which prevented or regulated data access between internal systems and the external world. With the adoption of wireless, firewalls can be bypassed, exposing internal systems to free external access. External devices can access internal enterprise networks, while internal devices can also connect to networks outside the company’s premises in the absence of adequate security measures.

There are a few different capabilities that a company needs to be able to tackle this threat. First, being able to detect that wireless intrusion is happening. Second, being able to phyisically (i.e. goegraphically) locate exactly where the threat is coming from. Third, being able to do something about it. And finally, for the sake of compliance with government laws, being able to generate appropriate reports proving that you took all the appropriate steps to keep your company’s data secure from hackers. This last one is required whether you are worried about hackers or not, and is a huge pain.

AirTight provides all these facilities and then goes one step further, which makes it unique. At $20000 a pop, most small companies would balk at the price of all the infrastructure required for achieving all this. So AirTight provides WiFi security as an online service – you simply install a few sensors in your company. Everything else is on AirTight’s servers. So you just have to pay a small monthly fee, as low as $60 per month. And you get full security from wi-fi hacking, and you keep the government happy with nice compliance reports.

For a more details of AirTight’s products, see the PuneTech wiki profile of AirTight.

Related articles:

• Wi-Fi network extremely vulnerable to terror attacks Economic Times
• E-Week Profile of AirTight
• AirTight offers wireless security as a service – PuneTech article
• The ethics of “stealing” a WiFi connection