It has become very hazardous to use public wifi. Some hackers scour the public libraries, cafés and other public access points with cheap blackboxes (WiFi sniffers). Those blackboxes are able to grab MAC addresses, IDs, passwords and many other confidential information from the patrons. Websites are spoofed,hotspots are faked, legitime Internet sessions are intercepted through man-in-the-middle and good names are destroyed, accounts looted in the process.
My advice is, when you are in a public library:
- turn off your phone,
- avoid to use your personal laptop,
- while online don't perform any financial transaction,
- if you want to print, put your data in a USB drive and plug it to the library computer
- DO NOT FORGET TO UNPLUG YOUR THUMB DRIVE!.
You can go online to read the news, but anything else would be hazardous.
My two cents...
Image of sniffer capture over public WiFi (Courtesy of acrylicwifi.com)
