A study has discovered that while retailers are physically securing their businesses to prevent theft, they are not taking the same precautions with their wireless security. The “2007 Retail Shopping Wireless Security Survey” conducted by AirDefense, tested the wireless “perimeters” of 3,000 shops across the United States and parts of Europe. It discovered that of 2,500 wireless devices such as laptops, handhelds, and barcode scanners detected, 85 percent of these were wide open to hacking.

This is mostly down to data leakage, misconfigured access points, outdated access point firmware, poor naming choices for access points, and a “cookie-cutter” technology approach by large retailers. The survey also monitored nearly 5,000 access points, and AirDefense discovered that 25 percent were unencrypted. The good news was that 74 percent were encrypted, but 25 percent used Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), one of the weakest protocols for wireless data encryption. Forty-nine percent used Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) or WPA 2, the two strongest encryption protocols.