Glossary

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is a measure of speed in the networked world. The more bandwidth you have the faster a connection is. Most broadband accounts have a download bandwidth of up to 8Mbps (Mega bits per second) if you have a BT line or up to 20Mbps if you have Virgin Media.

Many ISPs (Internet Service Provider) also give customers a bandwidth 'allowance' per month. This is different to speed in the way that it is a measure of size or amount of data that you are allowed to transfer. Typically an ISP may give you an allowance of 2GB (Gigabytes) if you have a cheap package or 40GB if you pay a little more. This means you can transfer up to the allowance of data per month. That equates to around 2000 Pictures, 500 MP3 files or 3 Films if you have a 2GB limit or 40'000 Pictures, 10'000 MP3 files or 60 Films if you have a 40GB limit. If you go over your allowance you will often be charged, rates vary but are normally around £1 per extra GB used.

If someone was using your Internet connection they will often cause it to slow down dramatically. If they were downloading files they could also quite easily take you over your bandwidth 'allowance' for a month and end up costing you money!

Cloaked Network

You may find that you can 'see' other peoples wireless networks from your computer, these networks are sending out signals for other wireless machines to pick up. This enables machines to quickly and easily connect to there associated network.

There is a common misconception in the wireless security world that disabling this feature gives you more protection from attackers. You may also have read guides in several large PC publications and magazines that disabling the feature is a good step to securing your network. In reality it actually decreases your protection and has another disadvantage that it is now harder for associated machines to find and connect to their network. Leave this setting on!

Eavesdropping

Eavesdropping in the electronic world is very similar to eavesdropping in the real world. Someone positions themselves so as to overhear or listen in to other peoples conversations.

Eavesdropping on electronic communications can often reveal lots of confidential and privileged information. When using wireless technologies to transmit data eavesdropping is also very easy to do, it is also very hard to detect if someone is eavesdropping.

To protect against eavesdropping you must make sure that encryption is used on any data that is transmitted.

Encryption - Concealing Information

Encryption is taking data or messages that can be read by anyone and scrambling them in such a way that only people with the correct 'code' or 'key' can decrypt them.

Encryption has been around for many thousands of years, some of the first uses of encryption were discovered back in the days of Julius Ceaser. He used what are now simple codes to encrypt messages sent to his generals. Other uses were in the second world war when the Germans used the infamous Enigma machines to send messages to their fleets of U-Boats. Lucky for us the boffin's at GCHQ in Bletchly Park, England managed to 'crack' several of the codes and were able to decipher and read the messages.

Nowadays encryption techniques are much more complex and use 'algorithms' which are sets of mathematical instructions to 'cipher' or encrypt messages. Wireless networks use three main standards of encryption: WEP, WPA and WPA2. One of the biggest steps to securing a wireless network is to enable encryption. Unfortunately many people don't and this leaves them wide open to anyone that wants to take advantage of this. Another problem is that only WPA and WPA2 are any good, WEP encryption is seriously flawed and referred to as 'broken' by many.

File Sharing

Hard-disk Crash

Hardware

IM - Instant Messaging

MAC Security

Network Performance

P2P - Peer-to-Peer

Pre-Shared Key

Printer Sharing

Snooping

Software

Spyware

Trojan Horse

Un-delete

Virii - Viruses

WAP - Wireless Access Point

WEP - Wired Equivalent Privacy

WEP is a wireless security encryption standard. It was suppose to provide wireless communications with the same level of privacy or security that a hard wired connection would have.

Due to several major design flaws in WEP it is no longer deemed to be safe. WPA or better still WPA2 should be used to encrypt all wireless traffic. These encryption standards do not suffer from the same design flaws as WEP.

Wireless networks which use WEP encryption are affected by the same risks that an unprotected or 'open' network is. WEP encryption can take as little as 60 seconds to break with the use of readily available and free programs. Many attackers actually see breaking WEP networks as a sport! If you have only WEP encryption enabled on your network then you are in no way secure, upgrade now!