The survey also recorded explosive growth in the number of wireless networks across the four financial centres, with the number in London rising 770% since 2001.
Wireless networks – also known as Wi-Fi or Wireless Local Area Networks or WLANs – can fall victim to malicious hacking techniques, from eavesdropping on company secrets to computer network disruption and the launching of denial of service attacks using the cover of an unsuspecting company.
According to RSA Security, a high proportion of businesses surveyed had not even configured their networks to reach the basic security levels. A daunting 72% of access points in Milan were unencrypted; 41% were unencrypted in Frankfurt; and in Paris and London, where the best encryption levels were found, still one third of all access points featured no encryption.
Organisations are also failing to heed the dangers of leaving wireless networks' default settings unaltered. This can lead to the organisation's name or geographical location being broadcast and acting as bait to a would-be-hacker.
Thirty-nine percent of all access points in Paris still displayed default values, said RSA Security. This rose to nearly half of all access points in Milan, with Frankfurt showing around 33% of all access points. The lowest was London, with 25% still displaying default values.
On a positive note however, the London survey, and to a lesser extent the other European surveys, revealed a greater number of businesses using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) as an alternative to wireless encryption protocols. These second generation networks are more secure than their predecessors.