In practice, that means hackers could steal your passwords, intercept your financial data, or even manipulate commands to, say, send your money to themselves.Īn attacker needs to be physically in range of a particular Wi-Fi network to carry out the assaults, an important limitation. In some situations, the vulnerability even leaves room for an attacker to manipulate data on a Wi-Fi network, or inject new data in.

They're also, it turns out, vulnerable to cryptographic attack.Ī flaw in WPA2's cryptographic protocols could be exploited to read and steal data that would otherwise be protected, according to new research from security researcher Mathy Vanhoef of KU Leuven in Belgium. And since it's been the secure option since 2004, WPA2 networks are absolutely everywhere. Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 is the current industry standard that encrypts traffic on Wi-Fi networks to thwart eavesdroppers. You may not specifically know when or why someone advised you to do this, but it was solid advice. When you set up a new Wi-Fi network, you're probably conditioned by now to check the 'WPA2' box.

Huge wpa2 wordlist