Wireless Security Audit and Hardening for a Telco's Public Wi-Fi
Overview
What this challenge is about.
Score 80 access points against a hardening rubric, rank top issues by traffic, and design a 12-month rollout. You get a verifiable certificate.
The scenario
Sintra Telecom is a Lisbon-based mid-tier mobile and fiber operator with around 6,200 employees, whose roughly 14,000 public Wi-Fi access points across metro areas and four airports are a visible part of its brand and a growing security liability. Public Wi-Fi at this scale mixes hardware from several vendors and years of accreted configuration, so drift toward weak settings is common and rarely caught without a deliberate audit.
The Brief
What you'll do, and what you'll demonstrate.
Audit a sampled set of 80 public Wi-Fi access points and design a 12-month hardening rollout that closes systemic wireless-security issues without breaking customer sign-on.
Earning criteria — what you'll demonstrate
- Translate a recognized wireless-hardening checklist into a reproducible, evidence-anchored scoring method across many access points
- Distinguish encryption, authentication, and onboarding weaknesses (WPA2 vs WPA3, EAP method choices, captive-portal and Hotspot 2.0 configuration)
- Prioritize remediation by real exposure rather than by ease of fixing
- Sequence a multi-region, multi-vendor rollout with rollback criteria that protects service continuity
- Write customer communications that maintain trust during a security migration
Program Fit
Where this fits in your program.
Sharpens the same skills your degree expects you to demonstrate.
Aligned coursework coming soon.
Skills
Skills you'll demonstrate.
Each one shows up on your verified credential.
- Wireless Security
Apply wireless security to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Wpa3
Apply wpa3 to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Eap
Apply eap to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Audit
Apply audit to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Protocol Security
Apply protocol security to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Roadmap Planning
Apply roadmap planning to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
Careers
Career paths this challenge builds toward
Completing this challenge demonstrates skills that transfer directly to these roles:
Security Engineer
This challenge mirrors the core security-engineering loop: audit a real fleet against a hardening standard, prove your findings with evidence, and turn them into a phased remediation that operations can execute without breaking the service.
This challenge sharpens
- wireless-security
- audit
- protocol-security
Network Security Architect
Designing a multi-region, multi-vendor migration from WPA2 to WPA3 with rollback criteria is exactly the systems-level planning a network security architect owns when modernizing authentication and encryption across infrastructure at scale.
This challenge sharpens
- wpa3
- eap
- roadmap-planning
Security Operations Lead
Prioritizing systemic issues by measured exposure and sequencing remediation waves with clear entry and rollback gates builds the operational judgment a security operations lead applies when running hardening programs across a live customer estate.
This challenge sharpens
- audit
- roadmap-planning
- wireless-security