Using Airport and Hotel Wi-Fi Is Much Safer Than It Used To Be (wired.com) 60
As you travel this holiday season, bouncing from airport to airplane to hotel, you'll likely find yourself facing a familiar quandary: Do I really trust this random public Wi-Fi network? As recently as a couple of years ago, the answer was almost certainly a resounding no. But in the year of our lord 2018? Friend, go for it. Wired: This advice comes with plenty of qualifiers. If you're planning to commit crimes online at the Holiday Inn Express, or to visit websites that you'd rather people not know you frequented, you need to take precautionary steps that we'll get to in a minute. Likewise, if you're a high-value target of a sophisticated nation state, stay off of public Wi-Fi at all costs. But for the rest of us? You're probably OK. That's not because hotel and airport Wi-Fi networks have necessarily gotten that much more secure. The web itself has.
"A lot of the former risks, the reasons we used to warn people, those things are gone now," says Chet Wisniewski, principle researcher at security firm Sophos. "It used to be because almost nothing on the internet was encrypted. You could sit there and sniff everything. Or someone could set up a rogue access point and pretend to be Hilton, and then you would connect to them instead of the hotel." In those Wild West days, in other words, signing onto a shared Wi-Fi network exposed you to myriad attacks, from hackers tracking your every move online, to so-called man-in-the-middle efforts that tricked you into entering your passwords, credit card information, or more on phony websites. A cheap, easy to use device called a Wi-Fi Pineapple makes those attacks simple to pull off. All of that's still technically possible. But a critical internet evolution has made those efforts much less effective: the advent of HTTPS.
"A lot of the former risks, the reasons we used to warn people, those things are gone now," says Chet Wisniewski, principle researcher at security firm Sophos. "It used to be because almost nothing on the internet was encrypted. You could sit there and sniff everything. Or someone could set up a rogue access point and pretend to be Hilton, and then you would connect to them instead of the hotel." In those Wild West days, in other words, signing onto a shared Wi-Fi network exposed you to myriad attacks, from hackers tracking your every move online, to so-called man-in-the-middle efforts that tricked you into entering your passwords, credit card information, or more on phony websites. A cheap, easy to use device called a Wi-Fi Pineapple makes those attacks simple to pull off. All of that's still technically possible. But a critical internet evolution has made those efforts much less effective: the advent of HTTPS.
I recommend the Chinese wifi (Score:3)
It comes with laptop maintenance, even if you don't ask for it.
Missing details (Score:2)
blank screen (Score:2)
Still don't trust it (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Using your own personal VPN connected to your home network or rather "secure network" is a good idea. Why bother with remote desktop to another computer connected via VPN when you can set your VPN client to route ALL traffic to the VPN server?
Re: (Score:2)
Using your own personal VPN connected to your home network or rather "secure network" is a good idea. Why bother with remote desktop to another computer connected via VPN when you can set your VPN client to route ALL traffic to the VPN server?
For a variety of reasons. My bank account websites do not allow me to connect with a new web browser without authenticating it. It also keeps the website history and other information off of the laptop in case it gets lost or stolen (assuming they can bypass disk encryption). Sometimes I just bring an iPad and this lets me use the desktop at home as a full fledged computer for the times when a mobile browser is not ideal. It really just depends on what I am doing and what I have with me.
Re: (Score:2)
What you say is true when in-country, but not when travelling. International data at LTE speeds is still expensive.
Re: (Score:1)
If you site only has recipes then you don't need HTTPS!
HTTPS does two things
a) Identify the remote site
b) Encrypt the traffic
If you are browsing recipes you do not need your traffic encrypted
If you are browsing recipes then you need to be paranoid to require that a third party believes the remote site is who they say they are.
Re:Queue Some TechnoLuddite (Score:5, Informative)
HTTPS does two things
You actually forgot a third valuable thing: content integrity. HTTPS makes sure a man in the middle cannot push a malware inside your recipe pages.
And that is not a James Bond scenario. I have seen a Windows malware running on a PC and infecting the HTTP stream that passes within its reach.
Re: (Score:2)
HTTPS does three things
a) Identify the remote site
b) Encrypt the traffic
c) Ensure the integrity of the traffic
FTFY. And the item you forgot is just as important as (a), and generally more important than (b).
Re: (Score:1)
HTTPS does indeed authenticate the remote site via a chain a trust. This is why when you enter your banks address you can be confident that you really are talking to your bank and not a scam artist.
Re: (Score:1)
In my head I was bundling this one up with a but I'll grant you this should be separate.
However this doesn't get away from "it's a cooking recipe site FFS!". The evil plot by ninja hackers to insert too much salt into peoples cooking recipes and thereby kill off the entire western world will be exposed at last.
I know people are going to talk about ads and tracking the cooking websites I go to so they can blackmail me of the chocolate browny recipes that I downloaded but this is just insane paranoia. Th
Who cares? (Score:2)
People who care switch on their VPN if it's isn't already on by default and the other get spied on by even more people than usual.
A VPN costs about 5$month for usually 5 machines concurrently (PCs, cellphones, tablets...)
Re: (Score:2)
THe device connecting to the wifi would need to block all other traffic until the VPN is connected and there are very few things that do that.
I disagree (Score:2)
Surf with the security services (Score:2)
Southwinds, Thieving Magpie and Homing Pigeon
Canada had the wifi part covered.
Pass (Score:2)
If I use a public WiFi, the very first thing I do is start a VPN connection up. ( My own server at home )
If the WiFi disallows it, I disconnect.
Easy.
Re: (Score:2)
If the WiFi disallows it, I disconnect.
You may want to try iodine (tunnelling over DNS). Handles bogus WiFi pretty well.
Re: (Score:3)
Last time I was at a conference center, the DNS request is what blocked your address and forced you to go off to the captive portal. Those of us who had IPs memorized (or a hosts file entry) could connect and SSH/VPN in direct, and once connected get DNS over the VPN/SSH tunnel.
This of course made the PHBs jealous in the planning meetings (we were setting up to host a large educational conference) so this lowly geek who was wondering why he was even being sent to these meetings suggested "hey, we're about
It sure is! (Score:2)
Of course in my case it's because I tether via phone instead of using airport or hotel WiFi.
The advent of... (Score:2)
So HTTPS is a new thing now?
Seriously, 2000, you can stop now.
Airport Hotel Wi-Fi much safer than it used to be? (Score:2)
It was never a problem (Score:2)
That is, given appropriate safety measures, like using secure shell or a VPN tunnel. You cannot and never could trust the network.
This is how security SHOULD be implemented (Score:3)
Done correctly, it should not be necessary to trust intermediate third parties, in order to have a secure connection. Who knows who is carrying your packets between here and Romania! Who even knows if your packets are going through Romania, on their way to Texas! This is the nature of the internet.
Make it possible to establish a secure connection between two parties, and it doesn't matter whether you are using Joe Shmo's cell phone hotspot with an SSID of Denver International WiFi.
Leaky (Score:2)
A lot of corporate laptops leak information when connected to other networks, they try to connect to various internal resources and in doing so disclose either the ip addresses or the dns names.
Not exactly (Score:1)