Australian cities exposed in war driving exercise

28.11.2005
A state-by-state war driving exercise undertaken in October across Australia's capital cities identified the risk of corporate network intrusions through weak Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN,).

It found an alarmingly high number of organizations are making their corporate networks easy targets for hackers.

The inaugural Altiris/SpectroTech 2005 IT Security Vulnerability Report covered the central business districts of Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. As connecting to a corporate network is illegal, SpectroTech used passive tools to blindly capture and collate the data.

"These results were a big surprise to us because everyone is at risk," said SpectroTech principal consultant Mark Morgan. "You would be shocked if you heard the names of the major Australian organizations that we picked up."

The results showed 18 percent of CBD based organizations are using default configuration settings for their wireless access points. Melbourne was at the highest risk with 18 percent followed by Hobart (14 percent) and Canberra (13 percent).

"Either companies don't have the knowledge and expertise to design or configure secure solutions or there are rogue devices running rampant on these networks," Morgan said.