Introduction

Millions of wireless access points are spread across the US and the world. About 70% percent of these access points are unprotected—wide open to access by anyone who happens to drive by. The other 30% are protected by WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) and a small handful are protected by the new WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) standard.

At a recent ISSA (Information Systems Security Association) meeting in Los Angeles, a team of FBI agents demonstrated current WEP-cracking techniques and broke a 128 bit WEP key in about three minutes. Special Agent Geoff Bickers ran the Powerpoint presentation and explained the attack, while the other agents (who did not want to be named or photographed) did the dirty work of sniffing wireless traffic and breaking the WEP keys.

This article will be a general overview of the procedures used by the FBI team. A future article will give step-by-step instructions on how to replicate the attack. Read More…

1.    A quick way to jump into PowerPoint’s Master views (97/98/2000)

If you want to change to one of the Master views without using the menu options, there’s a simple way to do it. Simply hold down the [Shift] key and click one of the slide view buttons in the lower-left portion of your screen. Depending on which button you click, PowerPoint switches to that Master view. For example, if you hold down the [Shift] key and click the Slide View button, PowerPoint switches to Slide Master view.

2.  Applying the same animation effects in PowerPoint (97/98/2000)

If you want to apply the same animation effect to several different objects, you don’t need to select each object and change the effect individually. Instead, you can select all the objects at once and apply the same effect to all of them. To do this, first open an existing presentation with several unanimated objects on one of the slides. Next, choose Slide Show | Custom Animation to open the Custom Animation dialog box. Click on the Order & Timing tab and select the check box next to each object you want to animate. Read More…