Beware the Airport Wireless

schwit1 writes to tell us that a recent study by a Silicon Valley-based security company shows that black-hats have been ramping up their use of tempting free or unsecured wireless access points in high travel areas like airports and hotels. "According to their study, even the 'secure' networks weren't all too safe. Eighty percent of the private Wi-Fi networks at airports surveyed by Airtight were secured by the aging Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol, which was cracked back in 2001. Almost as many — 77 percent — of the networks they surveyed were actually private, peer-to-peer networks, meaning they weren't official hotspots. Instead, they were running off someone else's computer."

Comments

What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the big deal? Why worry about the insecurity of the local wireless network when you're connecting to the Internet... hello, it's insecure!! If your computer isn't secure it doesn't matter whether the local network is or isn't, your computer is still insecure. If you are doing things across the network that you want to keep private and you aren't doing them over SSL/SSH/VPN you are an idiot regardless of whether the local wifi uses WEP, WPA2, or no encryption at all.

Re:Old

[girlintraining]

And for that matter, you're in a insecure place connecting via some random network. Its just stupid.

But very convenient. You'd be surprised how much Stupid you can get for Convenience.

Re:How is this dangerous to a normal user?

[sopssa]

What about if the hotspot doesn't actually give the user the real page, but instead phishing page? I doubt many normal users notice that HTTPS isn't on. Or like in the above The Real Hustle video, "for $1 you can get one hour of surfing time, just enter your credit card details" and you probably can guess what happens from there.