This week’s security scandal is the discovery that every household with wifi in this country has a network that isn’t really private. For 13 years a weakness has lurked in the supposedly secure way in which wireless networks carry our information. It is not a catastrophic flaw: the attacker has to be within range of the wifi they are attacking. Such hacks might be regarded as the outcome of technical wizardry, but are dependent on human shortcomings in recognising and fixing security flaws. In criminal hands, social engineering beats software engineering every time, and the problems of the internet cannot entirely be solved by technical means.

Source: The Guardian October 19, 2017 18:33 UTC