“I am very careful with my credit cards, and this was a card that I used very rarely,” Harrison said. “So I believe there is a high chance that’s how my information got stolen.”
Although it may be convenient to use free, public, unsecured Wi-Fi – such as those found in some hotels, airports and coffee shops – these networks are the least secure. Criminals have been using them to easily steal your information, potentially hijacking your device and possibly your life through these unprotected networks.
And these criminals are employing hard-to-notice tactics, such as sniffers and official-looking network names, to accomplish all of this.
“Gone are the days where you would have to be a computer engineer to hack into people’s devices via Wi-Fi,” says Ryan Wright, an associate professor of information systems at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “Now, any semi-tech-savvy person can download an application and track any unencrypted traffic on the Wi-Fi connection.”
Good-guy IT security professionals have been using sniffers, software that read wireless data as it travels through the air, to determine the security of a network. But bad guys have been using them to see your data as it travels from your device to the router communicating the wireless internet signal.
And sniffers are hard to detect.
“Think of wireless networks as the old-style party phones where anyone can pick up their phone and listen to other people’s conversations,” Wright says. “The only way you would know if someone else was listening on the party line was to hear them make an inadvertent sound. Sniffers work under a similar principle. They listen to the traffic but rarely, if ever, generate any traffic on the network.”
Another way hackers can get your information while you’re traveling is by setting up a legitimate-looking Wi-Fi connection, which experts say are typically named something like “Free Wi-Fi” or “Public Wi-Fi.” An unsuspecting customer at, say, a coffee shop will then connect to the hacker’s “Free Wi-Fi” network, unknowingly giving the hacker his or her information. Criminals have also used default router names such as “Netgear” to trick people into trying to find free Wi-Fi.
And if the customer has enabled sharing of folders, hackers can directly steal files and folders. The hackers also could spoof legitimate websites with hopes that people will provide a username and password.
“When someone uses a spoofed Wi-Fi connection, hackers can then replace requests for legitimate websites with spoofed websites designed to steal usernames and passwords,” Wright says. “For example, if I access a spoofed Wi-Fi connection and go to American Express, the hackers would send me a fake website instead with the hopes that I enter in my username and password.”
All of this allows the hacker to just sit back and collect information that is garnered when people surf the web.
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