Public Wi-Fi Hotspots Could Pose Security Risks
Someone could be stealing your identity while you surf the Web in a coffee shop.
May 12, 2007 — -- More and more Americans are carrying their laptops with them everywhere they go and thanks to wireless technology, you can now log onto the Internet anywhere, but identity thieves have figured out a way to eavesdrop on wireless Web surfers.
According to Jupiter research, one-third of all computer users who go online use public Wi-Fi hot spots and while this may be convenient, in public, someone could be trying to steal your personal information: logon names, passwords, even credit card and banking information.
"Good Morning America Weekend Edition" conducted an experiment in a Los Angeles coffee shop with Trend Micro's computer security expert Tim Bryan to determine how safe public Wi-Fi is.
With the help of software available on the Internet, Bryan looked at the Web pages of other coffee shop patrons.
"We can see what stories they are looking at," Bryan said. "We have the content of the entire Web page they are looking at."
The practice is called "packet sniffing." At many Wi-Fi hot spots, all the unsecured pages you look at online are broadcast for anyone to see.
"In the public areas, Wi-Fi is not really designed at all to be secure," said Stephen Trilling, a vice president in research and development at Symantec. "It's designed to be easily accessible by as many people as possible."
All a hacker needs is access to the same Wi-Fi signal, and a little computer know-how.
Although in our experiment, café patrons were warned of "GMA"'s presence in advance, real criminals could take this information and use it to their advantage
"If I knew a little bit about you, you know, we could have some sort of con," Bryan said. "I could trick you into giving me your credit card information, your passwords, you know, your banking information. The sky's the limit."
Encrypted sites like e-mail log-ons and bank sites cannot be read through sniffing, but hackers have a way to get those too --
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