Cheap, cool, and dangerous
Something had been bothering Peter Johnson ever since last November, when the announcement of security flaws in the standards used for wireless LANs boomeranged his wireless project for the U.S. Army back to the drawing board. It wasn't that the initiative was delayed several months while Johnson bought encryption technology. It was those ads in the Sunday newspaper fliers for cheap wireless LAN hardware on sale at your local electronics store.
"The average person buys it because they say, 'Hey, I can run my computers off of one network'" and one Internet connection, says Johnson, former CIO of the Army's Program Executive Office of Enterprise Information Systems in Fort Belvoir, Va. "The technology is great. It's inexpensive. But this technology that's being sold for a couple hundred dollars doesn't come with a big red sticker that says, 'Warning, this is really insecure.'"