Protect Yourself in Public Wi-Fi Hotspots

Nearly everywhere you turn these days has an offer of free wireless internet or Wi-Fi hotspot.  Merchants and businesses such as Barnes & Noble, Starbucks and McDonalds are a few of the big names to offer free Wi-Fi connections to customers.  I have noticed many of the Dunkin Donuts shops in my area offer the same, along with many diners and small restaurants.  Add to that hotels, airports, libraries, etc. and you are never very far from a signal.

The problem with many of these “hotspots” as they are called is that they are not secure.  The ease of getting on to the system for a customer is also its downfall.  Without a suitable encryption mechanism all machines on the network are open and available to hackers and criminals.  For example, you are at Starbucks, you pull out the laptop while sipping your latte and you log on to several password protected sites for email, financial records, etc.  A thief sitting near you or near enough to also get the signal is “sniffing” the network for sensitive data like usernames and passwords.  Many of these network sniffer programs are available online and at the disposal of hackers and criminals.

You leave Starbucks and later the thief logs into some of your personal accounts to steal money, information, etc.  Not a gret scenario.  What can you do to protect yourself?  Make sure your computer uses a strong password.  A strong password will contain a mix of letters, numbers/characters and upper & lower case.  It is your front door lock to keeping people off your system.  It is not a fail-safe but most hackers will go to the easy machine first, meaning no password.  For more information please see this handy resource from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/password/create.mspx

Adding or using a good firewall program is necessary as well these days.  Windows XP (SP2) and Vista users have a solid firewall client built-in.  Make sure that is running and doing its job.  You can easily find paid & free firewall software online for other operating systems.  For a nice list of software choices please visit: http://www.firewallguide.com/software.htm

Next up is to have some built-in encryption software of your own to use to mask the information you send & receive online.  Both AT&T and T-Mobile, which provide the bulk of these hotspots claim to have personal encryption software solutions online.  I could not locate any such thing on either site.  Searching online became somewhat fruitless as well until came across Protexx (http://www.protexx.com/).  The company has two versions, an individual and a family/business version.  Both are well worth the investment if you often utilize public wireless locations.

Some additional resource links:

http://www.att.com/gen/general?pid=6504

http://hotspot.t-mobile.com/support_faq.htm

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/wireless/2007-08-06-wifi-hot-spots_N.htm

http://www.protexx.com/express.html

http://www.firewallguide.com/software.htm

http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/password/create.mspx

This entry was posted on August 7, 2007 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Internet, All Platforms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.