Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) is a short-range wireless technology that has a niche promising market. WLAN was developed by IEEE in what is termed as IEEE802.11 family standard. The popularity of WLAN has been on the rise. Along with this popularity has come a well publicized series of vulnerabilities and risks in the IEEE802.11 implementations. Furthermore, the normal risk assessment/risk mitigation process is complicated by a confusing set of authentication and encryption mechanism and the strengths and weaknesses of each. The aim of this paper is to address each of these risks in detail and identify the real-world best practices needed to deploy and maintain a secure WLAN. The taxonomy of ever-expanding list of WLAN attack techniques is described. The generic mechanisms available for authentication of users and the protection of the privacy and integrity of the data are presented. A basic analysis of each security countermeasure by looking at the attack techniques addressed by the mechanism is reported. A number of recommendations for WLAN security are stated. Without these suggestions, not only is a WLAN vulnerable, but the entire information infrastructure of which it is a part is at risk.