WEP key wireless cracking made easy | The Register

If you’re one of the many people still using older wireless gear that doesn’t support WPA, it may be time to toss it. A group of German cryptography researchers has modified a tool called aircrack, greatly reducing the amount of time it takes to recover the WEP key. While the weakness of the WEP encryption scheme has been widely known for years, there hasn’t been a tool that could break the encryption so quickly until now. This could give would be wireless leeches easy access to your encrypted wireless network, no matter how clever your password is. While the intrusion is bad enough, it also exposes you to the legal consequences of anything someone might do while connected. If you’ve got wireless, but no WPA, now is the time to get it. If you don’t know how, get help or turn it off.