Wireless services in airports, cafés, and hotels are often not encrypted. So user bewareYou have an hour before your flight, so you log in to the Wi-Fi network at the airport. You look up some stock prices, check your e-mail, pay a couple of bills online, and surf a few Web sites. Has it occurred to you that curious or hostile eyes could be peering into your computer and your network? It pays to be paranoid.
The wireless service offered in airports, coffee shops, hotels, and other hotspots is almost always unencrypted. That means anyone else on the network who is equipped with readily available software can read your transmissions with little effort. And when there is protection, it's likely to be a form of encryption called Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) that's easily broken.
A survey of 14 airports in the U.S. and three in Asia by AirTight Networks, a company that sells gear to make wireless connections more secure, found that 57% of the networks were wide open. These included both networks for public and private systems used for airport functions such as baggage handling and ticketing. An additional 28% of the networks were protected by WEP, while only 15% used a stronger form of security, called Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA).
Read More
