Running a wireless network at home or the office? Piece of advice, if you're currently relying on WEP encryption to block intruders out, switch to WPA ASAP!

Though its been known for a while that WEP is somewhat easy to crack, that appears to have just gotten a whoooole lot easier, with word spreading on the web that it can be done in as little time as a minute or so.

More info at The Inquirer and The Register.

SECURITY EXPERTS say that the WEP protocol for security LANs is totally broken and should be dumped on sensitive networks.

Boffins at Darmstadt Polytechnic said that WEP uses the RC4 stream to encrypt data which is transmitted over the air, using usually a single secret key 40 or 104 bit long.

WEP has been known to be insecure since 2001 after Scott Fluhrer, Itsik Mantin, and Adi Shamir published an analysis of the RC4 stream cipher. Since then crackers have been able to recover the key to a greater or lesser degree of success.