Greg's Corner

Exploit makes all Wi-Fi vulnerable. Is it time to panic?

A leading security expert recently discovered an exploit in the algorithm that keeps most Wi-Fi devices secure. The exploit, named KRACK, allows a bad actor to hijack your Wi-Fi and tunnel in to any of your Wi-Fi enabled devices. This means that your private information could be compromised or any sort of malware could be injected into your devices. Here’s all the guts of how the exploit works.

This makes any Wi-Fi enabled device vulnerable. That means it can effect phones, tablets, PCs, whether they run Windows, Android, iOS, MacOS and even Linux. So what can you do? Unfortunately, mostly wait. This exploit is so new that most distributors have not pushed any updates yet to fix the exploit. That’s not even taking into consideration that a lot of distributors, especially router manufacturers, never even update the firmware of their devices. The same goes for a lot of Android phone manufacturers too. You can use a virtual private network (VPN) to be more secure, however, they can be costly and some VPN providers can be shady themselves. For PCs and laptops you can go back to using your ethernet cables.

If any good news can come from this exploit it’s that someone has to be within distance of your Wi-Fi source to be able to launch an attack. So if you’re at home, someone would have to be in range of your home router to try to hijack your signal. Businesses will be more vulnerable as a hacker will have better access to try to hijack that signal. Hopefully, manufacturers, distributors and providers will realize just how massive this vulnerability is and will issue patches as soon as possible. If you have additional questions and concerns you can go to krackattacks.com.