Any decent tech guy knows that WPA2 has been officialy broken using an attack called KRACK. What does this mean? It means that any WPA2 network can be attacked with a Man in the Middle Attack, providing that the attacker is close (or has a device close) to you. Ouch!

This reminds me back in the day where FireSheep was still a thing. This allowed any user to Hijack any unsecured Wi-Fi and browse the user’s session. This now means that WPA2 is now as secure as Unsecured Wi-Fi since any data travelling on WPA2 can potentially be sniffed out.

Allright then, what does it mean for me, as a consumer? This means that at the moment, one cannot fully trust that no-one is listening on his WPA2 network. This also means that we need HTTPS now, more than ever! Why? Simple, because this means that if the user does indeed get a hold of your traffic, he still would not make any sense of it since it’s being encrypted! VPNs now also play a good role here; one can use a VPN to make sure that any traffic that he generates (even HTTP traffic) is indeed encrypted.

If you’re connected to a network and not using HTTPS (or the HTTP protocol in general), unfortunately, you’re out of luck. You can’t safely rely that no-one is listening on your data. This means that if you’re running some Wi-Fi enabled camera, make sure that it’s either running a secure (HTTPS based for example) protocol, or just turn it off.

Fortunately, this issue is not persistent – a software update can be handed out in order to address this issue. Software vendors have already been notified on how to address this issue, it’s just a matter of waiting for said vendors to issue a fix.

In short, don’t assume that you’re safe if you’re running WPA2; the only way to encrypt your traffic is by encrypting it (HTTPS / VPN). Read more in depth on this hack here.