How often do you sit in a local coffee shop or at an airport or at the local courthouse and access free (or not free) Wi-Fi on your laptop or smartphone? No worries? The New York Times reports on February 16, 2011 that anyone using Wi-Fi in public places should be worried not just about highly skilled government intelligence agents and nerdy teenage hackers wherever hacking into your computer. According to the NY Times, some simple software allows almost anyone sitting next to you in a public Wi-Fi spot watch you browse the Web and even assume your identity online.
According to the NY Times, it's child's play (and anybody can play) "to see and even modify what you do online." A free program called Firesheep, released in October, has made it simple to see what other users of an unsecured Wi-Fi network are doing and then log on as them at the sites they visited.
Earlier posts about Wi-Fi issues published on this blog are:
5/25/2010: Firewall protection to increase Internet security
10/16/2010: Beware 'Free Public WiFi'
See also Murphy, Kate. New Hacking Tools Pose Bigger Threats to Wi-Fi Users, New York Times, 2/16/2011
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