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Crack your WiFi password to protect yourself

December 19, 2013 by Robert Siciliano — speaker, IDTheftSecurity.com

Today, anyone can learn code and understand the ins and outs of the technology we are simultaneously blessed and cursed with. But once you know how all this technology works to the point of calling yourself a hacker (which, by the way, isn't necessarily a bad word), then everyone in your life will be calling you to fix their devices.

Hackers are often technologists that are inventive, curious and take technology to the edge of its limits. They often break it so they can fix it.

One of the more interesting hacking professions is the "penetration tester." This individual is hired by a company in order to determine the vulnerabilities in its networks and then patches those vulnerabilities so bad guys can't get in.

"Penntesters," as they are known, are good-guy hackers also known as "white hats." Their counterpart bad-guy hackers — known as "black hats" — are also penntesters, but they don't look for vulnerabilities to then secure the network; they get in and steal stuff for their own personal gain.

One of the best ways to protect your own network is to hack your own network, as Lifehacker demonstrates:

"A new, free, open-source tool called Reaver exploits a security hole in wireless routers and can crack most routers' current passwords with relative ease. Here's how to crack a WPA or WPA2 password, step by step, with Reaver — and how to protect your network against Reaver attacks."

What this hacker does is to explain how the attack works, revealing the vulnerabilities users can use to reverse-engineer the process to protect themselves.

Whether on your own network or on someone's free wireless network, a VPN such as Hotspot Shield VPN will mask a user's IP address and protect wireless data from thieves.

But if a router is hacked, that vulnerability may still allow for an attacker to plant code on various devices. So check out the Lifehacker post and lock down your router with encryption.

Robert Siciliano is an Identity Theft Expert to Hotspot Shield VPN. He is the author of "99 Things You Wish You Knew Before Your Identity Was Stolen." For his free e-book, text — SECURE your@emailaddress.com — to 411247.

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