Protecting Your Privacy

One fundamental way to protect your traffic over unsecured networks is
to use a corporate virtual private network (VPN) to enhance your security through public network facilities. With this type of setup, if anyone
were to attempt to monitor your communications over your wireless
link, they would not be able to make sense of your traffic because it is
encrypted using a special sequence unique between your wireless workstation
and the server at your company’s headquarters. This type of
encryption is independent of what you find using the WEP encryption
that is part of the 802.11 standard.
The risks associated with using a third-party network
include the following:

1. Public wireless networks use a strong power level when transmitting.
This can become a serious vulnerability when hackers can eavesdrop
on your data channel from almost anywhere in the near vicinity.
2. Public networks, by definition, can be accessed by anybody. Any traffic
you send can be monitored, altered, or disrupted in any number of
ways. You have no control whatsoever over your network connection.
3. Public networks function as “links” to your network. This means
that if a hacker were to gain access or acquire your network passwords,
he or she could then potentially access your internal network
through a spoofed connection. This would leave your entire corporate
infrastructure vulnerable to attack in the worst possible ways.


When using a third-party network, you expose potential access gateways
into your fixed Ethernetworks too. Your only defense is to be wary
of these vulnerabilities and take the necessary precautions to monitor
incoming connection traffic from any external links into your server.