Wireless encryption question

we got a new wireless router and i've been setting up our wireless netowrk so that the computers can have access to each others drives. I setup the 10 digit WEP encryption so that random people cant use our network. Windows still tells me its unsafe to share drives...So I did some calculations as to how long it would take to brute force the encryption key and it would take something like 1 million years if you tried 1 key/second. obviously you would never be able to break it like this so...is there another way that someone could break into the network and is it really unsafe to share the drives?

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=wep+vulnerabilities
Because there are attacks which are considerably more efficient than brute force.

Personally, I can't see how this can possibly be anything remotely equivalent to the privacy of a wired network.

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:...k&ct=clnk&cd=1

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WEP was only intended to give wireless users the level of security implied on a wired network (which isn't much).

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http://www.phptr.com/articles/articl...2230&seqNum=12

Quote:

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This weakness, exploited by commonly available tools such as AirSnort, WEPCrack and dweputils, has the ability to crack WEP keys by analyzing traffic from totally passive data captures.

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How can they see what you are doing if they aren't even on your network (sorry if this is a stupid question, just trying to gather as much info on this topic as possible)

Same way that ethereal manages to spy on traffic between any two machines on a LAN without being involved.

Everything in range receives all the signals, all you need do is put your wireless network card into promiscuous mode and you can listen in on all the traffic.

"3 minutes"

Ten digits isn't much. Check this out for passphrases:

I would recommend using all the security features of your router: not displaying your SSID, using MAC filtering, and the best encryption it offers. Not broadcasting your SSID and MAC filtering can also be defeated, but I use all the means I have to secure my wireless lan. Just for fun, you could set up a VPN also!