Slashdot Mirror
Herding Firesheep In NYC — Do Users Care?
An anonymous reader writes "Following the Firesheep uproar, I spent some time telling people who don't read Slashdot about the vulnerability that open WiFi networks create in what seemed like the most effective way possible: by sidejacking their accounts and sending them messages about how it happened. The results were surprising — would users really rather leave their accounts open to intruders rather than stay off Facebook at Starbucks? The link recounts the experience, and also lists some rough numbers of how many accounts could be compromised at a popular NY Starbucks location."
I gave Firesheep a try today, and am surprised how many times my own cookies come up inside it without me directly visiting those sites. My google account came up without me browsing at all -- perhaps one of my firefox add-ons was using it, or maybe google latitude on my phone was triggering it? My facebook account came up when browsing other non-facebook sites as well, most likely from facebook connect. The users could have stopped visiting facebook after getting his warning messages and still had their cookies exposed.