CIO reports that recently Apple’s consumer-oriented notebook, MacBook, is vulnerable to an attack through it’s wireless networking system. In a security conference in the USA, security researchers David Maynor and Jon Ellch successfully managed to maliciously hack the MacBook to add and delete files stored on it remotely.

According to the story, it’s not only Apple machines vulnerable. Researchers also managed to gain access to laptops running Windows and Linux, due to bugs in the wireless card’s driver software.

This is a bit of a scary demonstration – the people that built the wireless card drivers can’t have done it very well if wifi is this easy to exploit. It also demonstrates that wifi is still a fairly new technology and while it remains that way we will no doubt have more problems. In fact, wireless networking has already had its fair share of problems and continues to evolve at an alarmingly fast rate. We’ve had Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption cracked, with readily available tools to crack the encryption. Then along came Wireless Protected Access (WPA) which at the moment seems to be fairly secure.

What do you think? Is wireless technology still a bit embryonic to be used as extensively as it is? Or is it actually remarkably stable considering its age?