Something had been bothering Peter Johnson ever since last November,when the announcement of security flaws in the standards used forwireless LANs boomeranged his wireless project for the U.S. Army backto the drawing board. It wasn't that the initiative was delayedseveral months while Johnson bought encryption technology. It wasthose ads in the Sunday newspaper fliers for cheap wireless LANhardware on sale at your local electronics store.

"The average person buys it because they say, 'Hey, I can run mycomputers off of one network" and one Internet connection, saysJohnson, former CIO of the Army's Program Executive Office ofEnterprise Information Systems in Fort Belvoir, Va. "The technology isgreat. It's inexpensive. But this technology that's being sold for acouple hundred dollars doesn't come with a big red sticker that says,'Warning, this is really insecure."

Welcome to the dark side of a technology that's actually cheap andeasy to use. Whether or not CIOs like it, wireless local area network(WLANWLAN) devices are being carried two-by-two into home and corporateoffices by employees who see ads like those and don't know that thesecurity of the devices is flawed. By Gartner's estimates, one in fivecompanies has a wireless LAN that the CIO doesn't know about, and 60percent of WLANs don't have the most basic security functions turnedon. Meanwhile, airports and Starbucks coffee shops are pushingwireless access, and a growing number of neighborhood associations andeven just neighbors are offering public Internetaccess - grassroots-style - by installing wireless transmitters. All theuser has to do is plug in a cheap network card, log on and startsurfing. Alles zu WLAN auf CIO.de

"It's just so cool," gushes Gartner's John Pescatore, describing arecent conference where Cisco Systems gave every attendee a wirelessnetwork card - and left the security up to individuals. People e-mailedPescatore questions during a speech rather than raising their hands.Maybe they turned off file-sharing in their operating systems and useda virtual private network to secure their laptops. Maybe they didn't.But they ate up the technology like jelly rolls at breaktime.

"It's not the IT shops leading the way," says Pescatore, who worksfrom Gartner headquarters in Stamford, Conn. "It's the users." But(and you saw this coming, right?), it's the IT shops that ultimatelymust lead the way to better security.