Essential Wireless Security- Watch Out for this potential trick

As wireless devices and services become more commonplace, we can also expect hackers and criminals to find new ways to trap us. I've read about a certain trick that some people will use to phish for information, and today I managed to catch a screen shot of this trick in action. I'm not saying that this is the trick, but this is certainly something that you should watch out for as you go about looking for a wireless hotspot in order to do your business, check email, check sports scores, or whatever you do.

I had to reboot my laptop at work today. While using Firefox, any time I tried to type, weird things happened. I selected the address bar and began to type an address that began with c, and my Open File window came up. When I typed www, tabs started closing. I realized it was probably time to reboot, so I did.

When my laptop came back up, I saw a balloon informing me that wireless networks were available. I've never seen a wireless network here before, so I thought I'd check it out. The network said "Free Internet Access", but I noticed something: this was a computer-to-computer network, rather than a router network as you can see from this screen shot.

This is something that people will do in order to collect data. They may have their own connection through a broadband card from a cellular carrier, and they will open up another connection that broadcasts "Free Wireless Internet". You see that and needing a free wireless internet connection yourself, click on it and find a connection. The only thing is that all of your data is going through their computer, where it can be intercepted. You may be using encryption, but the possibility exists for that encryption to be broken. Your passwords and credit card numbers can be harvested for use.

Stay away from these computer-to-computer "free wireless" access points. You don't know whether any particular access point is good or not, so why chance it?

Technorati tags: security, scams, wireless security, free internet access, free wireless access