wigle.net, the Wireless Geographic Logging Engine, collects data on wifi networks around the world. One of the most interesting resources on this site, is a chart tracking the use of encryption for wifi networks. The chart tracks different types of wifi encryption. The red line on the chart tracks unencrypted wifi networks; the yellow networks for which the encryption status is unknown, and the green for which there is some kind of encryption. As we can see from the chart it was only around November 2006 that the number of encrypted networks exceeded the number of encrypted networks. The WEP, Wired Equivalent Privacy, protocol continued to be more widely used than the WPA protocol until July 2012 despite the fact that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) stated in 2004 that this protocol no longer met its security goals. The WPA2 continues to be the most widely used encryption protocol.
