Let's talk about Firesheep (see what I did there?).
There's a gentleman who goes by the moniker of @codebulter or Eric Butler (if you're not into the whole brevity thing). Last weekend he published a very interesting article on his blog entitled "Firesheep" which eloquently describes the problems of logging into social websites such as Facebook or Twitter whole being connected to public WiFi hotspots.
I've been blathering on about it on Twitter and mentioned it to a few folks at Starfleet. Noone seems that bothered though and that is particularly disturbing.With more and more mobile devices readily available, this method of connection is fast becoming the de-facto standard for keeping in touch with your social network. But what Eric has done here, is highlight just how dangerous a practice that is....
Long and the short of it, if you haven't read this and the followup stuff, and you're prone to logging on at your local coffee shop or pub... get on it: http://codebutler.com/firesheep
What I've yet to find a satisfactory answer to yet is how this can be prevented on smart phones. Obviously the same sort of fixes can be applied and running a VPN, while a bit of a hassle isn't all that difficult. Equally, you could switch of your WiFi altogether, but that rather defeats the purpose. Surely, there should be an "app for that" :-)
Be warned, using any of these on an open network means there's every possibility that your personal data that's stored with them will be hacked.
You've been warned.
This post originally appeared here: Posterous
There's a gentleman who goes by the moniker of @codebulter or Eric Butler (if you're not into the whole brevity thing). Last weekend he published a very interesting article on his blog entitled "Firesheep" which eloquently describes the problems of logging into social websites such as Facebook or Twitter whole being connected to public WiFi hotspots.
I've been blathering on about it on Twitter and mentioned it to a few folks at Starfleet. Noone seems that bothered though and that is particularly disturbing.With more and more mobile devices readily available, this method of connection is fast becoming the de-facto standard for keeping in touch with your social network. But what Eric has done here, is highlight just how dangerous a practice that is....
Long and the short of it, if you haven't read this and the followup stuff, and you're prone to logging on at your local coffee shop or pub... get on it: http://codebutler.com/firesheep
What I've yet to find a satisfactory answer to yet is how this can be prevented on smart phones. Obviously the same sort of fixes can be applied and running a VPN, while a bit of a hassle isn't all that difficult. Equally, you could switch of your WiFi altogether, but that rather defeats the purpose. Surely, there should be an "app for that" :-)
Be warned, using any of these on an open network means there's every possibility that your personal data that's stored with them will be hacked.
| Amazon.com | Gowalla |
| Basecamp | Hacker News |
| bit.ly | Harvest |
| Cisco | Windows Live |
| CNET | New York Times |
| Dropbox | Pivotal Tracker |
| Enom | ToorCon: San Diego |
| Evernote | Slicehost: SliceManager |
| tumblr.com | |
| Flickr | |
| Foursquare | Wordpress |
| GitHub | Yahoo |
| Yelp |
This post originally appeared here: Posterous
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