Newstrack

AirTight offers industry's first proactive WEP protection

To help hoteliers proactively protect customer account data

EH staff - New Delhi

AirTight Networks, a provider of wireless intrusion prevention systems (WIPS), has added WEPGuard to SpectraGuard Enterprise, which is a proactive wireless intrusion prevention system to block and locate active WEP cracking attacks.

Says Pravin Bhagwat, CTO for AirTight Networks, "This will help detect and stop intruders using spoofed identity and compromised WEP keys. It will provide deep visibility into passive cracking exposure of datasystems using WEP so that the risk can be accurately assessed. While WEP is fundamentally broken, WEPGuard provides the best available solution for companies to go beyond passive techniques and actively manage and mitigate risk."

This will be available in SpectraGuard Enterprise in the fourth quarter of 2007. It will help hoteliers, retailers and operators of the service sector to meet the most recent version PCI DSS - version 1.1 - which added specific security requirements to protect networks and payment card data from wireless threats and risks. The PCI DSS is a multifaceted security standard that includes requirements for security management, policies, procedures, network architecture, software design and other critical protective measures. This standard is intended to help hoteliers protect customer account data.

"The overwhelming feedback at DEFCON 15 this year from our presentation on failure of WEP chaffing, as well as the publicity surrounding several high profile wireless retail breaches, indicates an urgent need to protect legacy systems until such time as upgrades to more secure protocols such as WPA and WPA 2 can be affected," said Bhagwat. "While some suggest that injecting chaff into the data stream is an effective way to confuse hackers, it is a passive approach which continuously eats up bandwidth and merely masks the problem leading to security by obscurity. Only active protection gives any measure of protection along with other best practices."

Explaining this, David King, chairman and CEO of AirTight, said, "With the introduction of WEPGuard, AirTight is providing the next generation of WEP security."

He said, "This obviates the need for a passive approach to protecting WEP keys and addresses the current wireless security needs of our clients who are dealing with maintaining the wireless security of expensive legacy systems. Previous attempts to secure WEP have simply masked the keys and been ineffective. The best approach is to mitigate risk and proactively stop and locate intruders without creating the negative consequences to network performance caused by injecting large amounts of traffic into the data stream. That is what WEPGuard provides."

AirTight offers a complete wireless intrusion prevention system to cover retail networks to help detect, classify, prevent and locate wireless threats. The products can be purchased as a traditional WIPS security system or as a managed wireless security service. AirTight also offers a wireless planning service to help hoteliers and other industry operators who are planning to deploy wireless in their stores, warehouses, distribution centers, or offices - to ensure adequate coverage and security.