Protecting Yourself
Even cautious users can't be certain of security. Most pay-to-access wireless networks do not include encryption because the provider would have to share the password with everyone in advance. That means an attacker could easily get a copy of it and decrypt traffic anyway. Even if a provider has a properly secured SSL-encrypted payment gateway, there's nothing to prevent anyone from watching your traffic or sniffing passwords, for example. Encryption of all your network traffic will provide such protection, as I covered in my "Secret Tunnels" article [6]. If you don't have a server to run your VPN traffic through, you might want to try the IPREDator VPN service [7]. IPREDator provides a PPTP-encrypted [8] VPN connection for EUR 5 a month, tunneling all your traffic to Sweden, where strict privacy laws should prevent access to it.
- Kismet: http://www.kismetwireless.net
- Aircrack-ng: http://www.aircrack-ng.org/
- "Metasploit" by Kurt Seifried, Linux Pro Magazine, November 2008, pg. 62. http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Issues/2008/96/METASPLOIT
- KARMA + Metasploit 3 == Karmetasploit: http://trac.metasploit.com/wiki/Karmetasploit
- Upside-Down-Ternet: http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html
- "Secret Tunnels" by Kurt Seifried, Linux Pro Magazine, July 2009, pg. 64. http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Issues/2009/104/SECRET-TUNNELS
- IPREDator: https://www.ipredator.se/
- "Close and Secret" by James Stanger, Linux Pro Magazine, December 2008, pg. 22. http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Issues/2008/97/CLOSE-AND-SECRET
- Wireless LAN channel list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels
- Wireless Networking in the Developing World: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2.4_GHz_Wi-Fi_channels_%28802.11b,g_WLAN%29.png
- Creative Commons Attribution and ShareAlike License: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedia
Kurt Seifried is an Information Security Consultant specializing in Linux and networks since 1996. He often wonders how it is that technology works on a large scale but often fails on a small scale.
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