How Unsecured Wi-Fi Networks Could Be Putting Your Business At Risk

Article

A Guest Network On Production Hardware Is Not A Guest Network

In our increasingly connected world, the office network has quietly become the least examined part of most environments. Endpoints get agents and monitoring. Cloud gets conditional access. The wireless network gets a password that was set during the fit-out and has not changed since.

The most common finding we see is a guest network that shares hardware and VLANs with production. It has a separate name and a separate password, which creates the impression of separation without any of the substance. Anything that joins the guest network can see and reach production systems.

The second most common finding is a shared pre-shared key that every employee, contractor, and long-departed staff member still knows. There is no way to revoke access for one person, so the credential effectively never expires.

Neither problem is expensive to fix. Segment guest traffic properly at the VLAN level with no route to production. Move corporate wireless to certificate-based or identity-backed authentication so access follows the user account rather than a shared secret. Then monitor what is actually connecting, because an unknown device on a corporate SSID should be an alert, not a discovery.