McAfee Wireless Protection 2007 review

Wireless networks can be a pain to configure, especially when it comes to security.

McAfee's Wireless Protection aims to make it simple to protect your wireless network and gives you control over the people who connect to it. The software comes with three user licences, so you can protect up to three PCs. You also get McAfee's Site Advisor, which tells you whether or not the website you're visiting is safe.

Once installed, Wireless Protection 2007 takes over from the Windows Wireless Zero Configuration Wizard as the wireless manager of choice. It can act in a similar way, letting you join wireless networks. We were a little concerned to see that an application that handles security should show in plain text any WEP or WPA keys you type in.

Wireless Protection 2007's real job, though, is to protect your wireless network. It's supposed to do this by connecting to your wireless router and configuring the security settings automatically. It's a good idea in theory, but the sheer number of wireless routers on the market makes this impractical. In fact, we couldn't get it to work at all on several new routers. It half-worked on a Linksys router, by which we mean that it connected, changed the security settings to use an unknown WEP key and then displayed an error message saying configuration had failed. We clicked the button for further help, but this only displayed the contents page of the online help. Locked out of our wireless network, we had to connect to our router using a wired Ethernet connection and reset the settings.

Eventually we managed to find a router that worked with it. This time the automatic configuration was successful, although Wireless Protection activated only WEP, so we had to configure it manually to use WPA.

With a secure network in place, Wireless Protection 2007 works well. Other PCs running the software can see the secure network and request to join it. This causes a pop-up to appear on the Administrator's PC asking if they want to allow the new computer to connect. It's simple and gives you a degree of control over who's connected. New PCs are sent the new security key when it's updated.

Wireless Protection 2007 is available only for PCs, but you can find out the current encryption key manually and enter it on your Mac or other network device. These devices will not receive key updates from Wireless Protection 2007, so if you don't want them to lose their network connection you have to disable key rotation. This leaves your network no more secure then it was before you had Wireless Protection 2007.

Now that WPA-PSK is available on most routers and wireless clients, there's less need for applications like this. WPA-PSK automatically rotates keys, so it's more secure than WEP provided you pick a secure password. With more and more wireless devices coming on to the market, McAfee's PC-centric approach isn't a good way to manage your network. It's also not guaranteed to work with every wireless router, so you're better off configuring your wireless settings manually and using WPA-PSK.

Author: David Ludlow