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Wired routers are, arguably, the most common example of insecure

Dec. 3, 2018 by Devin Jones

Wired routers are, arguably, the most common example of insecure wireless. But while WEP and WPA2 were clearly insecure, they did come with certain drawbacks (e.g., "no MAC address for your connection" was not always possible). These drawbacks were also mitigated by the fact that it took almost two years before wireless networks were able to be fully trusted in the first place; by then WEP was so widely used, that even the most well-intentioned attacks on WPA2 had to be thwarted, or worse, replaced by WEP. By the time WEP came along, many routers in the world had already figured this out, and they knew that they could continue to have the same security as WEP.

In the meantime, security in the wireless world has been steadily improving, but it has also become ever more difficult. Today, most routers are equipped with built-in malware, which means that some may even be capable of "sniffing" your IP address or forwarding traffic to other computers. The recent patch to update WiFi routers to WEP—which is available now for download on the Internet—will let you easily block some of this malware even while you're at it.

Wired routers are also more secure than they were before, because they are connected to both the Internet and the Internet Protocol. As this post explains, a WEP router can't actually use any other protocol, but instead needs to be connected to a specific WPA2 header used by all routers in the network. A wireless router's header can be sent to any WPA2 hub on the network, and it can't be changed to a WPA2 header. So unlike when WEP was used to protect the network from malware, routers can actually be used to sniff your IP address and forwarding traffic.

As the post noted, there are other wireless technologies that are in development at the moment that are vulnerable to WEP, such as WEP-based DNS, and WPA2-based WPA2 routers that can be configured to handle these scenarios (though at the time, some routers could only accept new WPA2 addresses).