In June 2021, the meat supplier JBS USA paid an $11 million ransom in response to a cyberattack that led to the shutdown of its entire US beef processing operation. The US government has attributed the ransomware attack to REvil, a criminal gang believed to be based in Russia or Eastern Europe. Every single business or person who pays to recover their files makes this payment directly to the attackers. The new emergence of anonymous currencies such as Bitcoin and Ripple gives attackers an easy way to profit with relatively low risk, making ransomware highly lucrative and funding the development of the next generation of ransomware. As you start to consider the serious security requirements for the wireless enterprise, an enterprise-grade level of security becomes essential. Two fundamental enterprise-grade security systems are IEEE 802.1X and EAP. This course examines the IEEE 802.1X and EAP framework, EAP authentication, and WPA, WPA2, and WPA3 security.

One of the challenges in a wireless environment is security. One aspect of security is providing secure guest access. Guests must be able to access the wireless network easily, without compromising the security of the corporate network. For this reason, wireless guest access is segmented into Internet-only access. If a malicious actor is an insider, they might employ similar methods as an external attacker. Or they might abuse privileged access to data, for example, by stealing a colleague's legitimate login credentials to access sensitive files from a cloud-based system. An insider might send the compromised information to their personal email address, a cloud storage account, or a portable storage device like a thumb drive. A “negligent insider” can also cause a data breach. This insider could be an employee or contractor who does not follow good cyber protocol in their workspace. For example, using weak and easy-to-guess passwords like 12345. A negligent insider might also download sensitive company data and fail to secure that information on their personal mobile device, like a laptop.