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New Wi-Fi attack highlights the need to upgrade to WPA-3

Patrick Devaney

Patrick Devaney

  • Updated:

Researchers looking into the new more secure WPA-3 Wi-Fi protocol have discovered a huge weakness in the current WPA-2 standard

We reported towards the end of June that the first WPA-3 Wi-Fi devices were becoming available. A collective of tech companies called the Wi-Fi Alliance were beginning to certify devices with the new enhanced security protocol, which is almost invulnerable to hackers guessing people’s passwords. Now researchers who have been looking into WPA-3 announced that they have found a new way to breach the current standard Wi-Fi formats WPA/WPA2.

WPA-2 Wif-Fi attack
A new method of attack puts your Wi-Fi network at risk

Although new WPA-3 devices are starting to come on the scene, almost all Wi-Fi enabled devices still use WPA-2. This latest vulnerability enables hackers to intercept sensitive information like passwords sent by WPA/WPA-2 devices. The attack relies on non-traditional methods, which make defending against it very difficult.

New Wi-Fi attack highlights the need to upgrade to WPA-3

The new WPA-2 vulnerability, discovered while looking for potential gaps in WPA-3 security, affects all WPA/WPA-2 secured modems which have Pairwise Master Key Identifiers. It will be places like hospitals and schools that will be most vulnerable to WPA-2’s security shortcomings.

Add this new threat to the massive KRACK vulnerability, discovered last year, and it is clear the world needs to start adopting WPA-3 much more quickly. At the time KRACK effected every WPA-2 enabled Wi-Fi device in the world, and a plethora of tutorials, patches, and updates were needed to get back on top of things.

The big difference between WPA-2 and WPA-3 is individual data encryption. The scrambling of all communication between Wi-Fi devices makes it much more difficult to crack. According to the researcher behind these new findings, this will make WPA-3 immune to this new method of attack. We can expect that there will be a wider release of WPA-3 certified devices this year. If things like KRACK keep cropping up, that can’t come fast enough.

Patrick Devaney

Patrick Devaney

Patrick Devaney is a news reporter for Softonic, keeping readers up to date on everything affecting their favorite apps and programs. His beat includes social media apps and sites like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat. Patrick also covers antivirus and security issues, web browsers, the full Google suite of apps and programs, and operating systems like Windows, iOS, and Android.

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