Here’s What You Can Do To Protect Yourself From The KRACK WiFi Vulnerability Flaw (Video)

 The layer of security that protects Wi-Fi networks has been hacked, which could allow hackers to listen to any device that’s connected to Wi-Fi. Josh King has the story:

Security researcher Mathy Vanhoef publicly disclosed a serious vulnerability in the WPA2 encryption protocol today. Most devices and routers currently rely on WPA2 to encrypt your WiFi traffic, so chances are you’re affected.

But first, let’s clarify what an attacker can and cannot do using the KRACKvulnerability. The attacker can intercept some of the traffic between your device and your router. If traffic is encrypted properly using HTTPS, an attacker can’t look at this traffic. Attackers can’t obtain your Wi-Fi password using this vulnerability. They can just look at your unencrypted traffic if they know what they’re doing. With some devices, attackers can also perform packet injection and do some nasty things. This vulnerability is like sharing the same WiFi network in a coffee shop or airport.

The attacker needs to be in range of your WiFi network. They can’t attack you from miles and miles away. The attacker could also take control of a zombie computer near you, but this is already a much more sophisticated attack. That’s why companies should release patches as soon as possible because chances are most attackers just learned about this vulnerability today.

There’s at least a theoretical possibility that this vulnerability could be exploited by hackers to make it more scalable as an attack vector in future — thinking of, for example, how worms have been developed and released that spread from one insecure IoT device to another to build a zombie botnet. But currently this is not the case.

So here’s what to do now that the WPA2 protocol is vulnerable…