The survey also recorded explosive growth in the number of
wireless networks across the four financial centres, with the
number in London rising 770% since 2001.
Wireless networks – also known as Wi-Fi or Wireless Local Area
Networks or WLANs – can fall victim to malicious hacking
techniques, from eavesdropping on company secrets to computer
network disruption and the launching of denial of service attacks
using the cover of an unsuspecting company.
According to RSA Security, a high proportion of businesses
surveyed had not even configured their networks to reach the basic
security levels. A daunting 72% of access points in Milan were
unencrypted; 41% were unencrypted in Frankfurt; and in Paris and
London, where the best encryption levels were found, still one
third of all access points featured no encryption.
Organisations are also failing to heed the dangers of leaving
wireless networks' default settings unaltered. This can lead to the
organisation's name or geographical location being broadcast and
acting as bait to a would-be-hacker.
Thirty-nine percent of all access points in Paris still
displayed default values, said RSA Security. This rose to nearly
half of all access points in Milan, with Frankfurt showing around
33% of all access points. The lowest was London, with 25% still
displaying default values.
On a positive note however, the London survey, and to a lesser
extent the other European surveys, revealed a greater number of
businesses using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) as an alternative
to wireless encryption protocols. These second generation networks
are more secure than their predecessors.
