Physical Access Point Security

Jun 21,2010 by alperen

Physical security for access points should include not only placing them
in secure locations that allow limited personnel contact with these
devices, but also programming hourly usage patterns so that access
points are “turned off” during non-business hours. Hackers realize that
most companies leave these devices on all the time. This is just an invitation
to hackers to use these WLANs to break into your network during
off-peak hours, when it is far less likely they will be detected by anyone
on your staff.

Another method of detecting malicious activity to your access point
devices is to monitor them to see that their “reset” feature is only being
used when an administrator needs to reinitialize the device. Only
authorized administrative personnel should have the power to change
these sensitive settings; otherwise if a group of employees has access to
these devices, it is simple for them to be misused or reprogrammed to
allow unauthorized users access to their information.
One of the problems with resetting access point devices is that every
time you reset the device, you can do so with an entirely new set of security
settings that can compromise the integrity of your WLAN and allow
unrestricted access into your network.