Your Security is At Stake With WiFi Hotspots

Connecting to the internet through wi-fi connections and hotspots has become a thing of choice in recent years. What many people do not know is that wi-fi hotspots are very easy means through which other people can gain unauthorized access to our sensitive data. Before I show you how, let’s make sure we understand what a wi-fi actually is.

WI-FI AT A GLANCE

Wi-fi means Wireless Fidelity , it is a means of connecting devices to the Internet through wireless means. Devices which are wi-fi enabled like computers, mobile phones etc. can connect to the internet through wifi hotspots.

Wifi hotspots are basically public places-like schools, hotels, cafes and airports-where internet can be accessed through our devices either for free or for a small fee. From that wi-fi hotspot you can access the network of a particular organizations and then browse the internet.

There are generally two types of wi-fi hotspots:

• An unsecured hotspot is one that does not require any form of security to gain access, not even a password.

• A secured hotspot makes use of encrypted technology such as a Secure Socket Layout(SSL), Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) and Transport Layer Security(TLS) to provide encrypted and secure communication between two end points.

It is a known fact that most wifi hotspots are actually unsecured and therefore critically unsafe. If you use any unsecured wifi hotspot for something as simple as checking your e-mails, you risk having your sensitive information stolen.

Proxy technology can be used to intercept and store wifi communications and data before sending it to a real hotspot. The fake/proxy hotspot is so easy to set up that even a smartphone can host a hotspot on itself.

An attacker could go to a public wifi hotspot -let's call it spot 1-and create a hotspot on his smartphone-spot 2-to trick people into using it so that it could sniff their internet traffic and then grab any data he thinks might be useful to him. Any and every data that passes through this connection is completely at his mercy.
You should protect yourself from this.

There is no almighty rule that can protect you completely but there are simple steps to take that will seriously reduce your exposure to this kind of attacks:

• Try as much as you can to connect to the internet using your 3G USB dongle,they are relatively safer than wifi hotspots. If you must use a wifi hotspot then use an encrypted hotspot.

But how do you know that a network is encrypted?
This is easy. You will know that a network is encrypted if you require a password to connect in the first place, but if you need the password only after you connect then it is not encrypted.

• Try your very best to use the encrypted versions of of all websites. Most websites have the HTTPS/SSL/TSL versions which is encrypted and makes it difficult for anyone snooping to understand. An easy way to do this is to use the firefox addon HTTPS Everywhere(https://www.eff.org./https-everywhere) which will automatically take you to encrypted versions of most websites.