One of the most insecure protocols of wireless network protection WEP can finally be cracked in a matter of minutes. If you have the possibility, you should upgrade your wireless network with a more secure protocol like WPA1 or WPA2 which are much harder to crack.

 
WEP stands for "Wired Equivalent Privacy", and it is a protocol based on 40 to 104 bit encryption. It should be able to protect your wireless network from "ordinary" users, but if someone wants to steal your bandwidth, it can be done in minutes. So much for privacy in WEP.

 
Data is sent over a wireless network in packets. To crack the WEP protection and extract the secret key (with the probability of 95%), the aircrack-ptw software needs about 85,000 data packets. FYI, about 40,000 can be caught and processed in one minute, using the computational power of an ordinary Pentium at 1.7GHz.

 
The conclusion is simple – don't use WEP anymore. It's obsolete and insecure.

 
If you are interested, read more here.

 
Of course, we are not encouraging anybody to hack into a private network.