August 8, 2008 Many retailers remain vulnerable to hackers Play video

(Peter Howe, NECN) - One would think retailers would have gotten the message about tightening access to their networks, but that's not the case.

In the war on hackers, Amit Sinha is one of the good guys. but today he's showing us how you'd start as a bad guy.

"Both these wireless laptops have you know wireless sniffing software running and what we're going to do is drive around in this open mall network and pick up wireless networks"

Sinha's data security company, air defense, is about to become part of Motorola. How easy or hard is it to get sniffing software? You can download it for free off the internet.

We've picked up you know about 20 different wireless networks.

One two three four of them are using wap encryption, which can be cracked in about 2 or 3 minutes.

Plus several whose wireless connections are utterly unprotected.

I don't want to get too technical here but really once you get into that store network it's an open PLAYGROUND for hackers

What we did was step one in the largest credit card hacking case in history.

Federal officials unsealed indictments tuesday in a case where 41 million charge card numbers were stolen.

11 men were indicted, from the US to Belarus, China, Estonia, Ukraine charged with cracking 9 retailers networks.