WEP + MAC Filtering – Why?

My home internet connection has been running a little slow lately; I think a lot of which has to do with the ancient Cisco router we are using. Connections often drop out, and at times some laptops are unable to connect.

I was looking for a nearby network to source some good, reliable internet from – living in an apartment block is always good for this After sifting through the candidates, I found a network with great signal strength, some very healthy traffic, and WEP encryption. Perfect. Started collecting packets, which were surprisingly good quality with the unique initialisation vectors piling up rapidly.

Didn’t take long and and I had myself a nice easy 40-bit WEP key. All that’s left to do is connect and enjoy free internet (and hopefully some interesting network shares), right? Wrong. Apparently it isn’t that easy. “Connection Timeout.”, “Connection Timeout.”… &*#*%^!! Some idiot thought it would be a great idea to enable MAC filtering.. So, back to my large collection of packets, collect a MAC address, and spoof my mac.

sudo ifconfig en1 ether TH:EI:RM:AC:AD:DR:ES:S!

Connect… Done. Wow, that was terribly hard. Next, browse to the router web interface, guess username and password (and it’s always admin/admin), and add my original MAC to the filter. Despite the fact that the router web interface was in Chinese (what a pain in the arse), the whole process is ridiculously easy.

So, this leads me to my question, WHY would you opt for WEP encryption, and go to all the trouble of enabling MAC filtering and adding the MAC address for every little device you have (laptops, desktops, phones, iPads etc) when you could just select another form of encryption that is actually SECURE? Do people really think this stuff works?

Disclaimer: I never perform, nor do I endorse or encourage illegal activity. The above story is entirely fictitious.