Dubai: Cyber criminals can easily hack user’s personal information from public WiFi networks as hackers rely on the fact that many people are relaxed about the security of the networks they connect to.
Public WiFi is everywhere and as it gains popularity in the region, with free connections available in most public places but there are also dangers surrounding it.
Gemalto staged a live hacking demonstration to highlight the dangers of public WiFi networks and how users can protect themselves and their personal information from hackers in Dubai on Wednesday.
The company has revealed how cyber criminals can easily use public WiFi networks to access private information on users’ devices.
Jason Hart, Chief Technology Officer, Identity and Data Protection at Gemalto, said that criminals now have the ability to create their own, illegitimate connections through these hot-spots, and extract information out of your laptops and smartphones.
Hart used a device which forced customers in a cafe to switch their phones and laptops from the establishment’s legitimate connection to his own fake WiFi without them knowing.
Hart’s tiny router-like device succeeding in overriding and effectively tricking phones and computers, showing how easily a thief can hack email accounts, obtain login passwords, track people’s movements and steal thousands of dirhams in just a few hours.
Today, cyber criminals are setting up WiFi hotspots, often with innocent-sounding names, such as ‘Free Public WiFi’, that con users into logging in.
The main issue, highlighted by Hart, is that many people are unaware of the risks involved in connecting to public Wi-Fi networks, and the personal information they are exposing to these hackers.
Cyber criminals will use every opportunity to infiltrate networks in order to gather personal and financial details, and what is more alarming, is how quickly they can extract this information. It is very straight forward for them to get information using public WiFi networks, particularly for unencrypted data.
With basic equipment and a laptop, it is easy for these criminals to advertise a hot spot and intercept the traffic of people who connect. They even have the ability to downgrade users “secure web connections” to spy on extremely sensitive data.
There are multiple reasons someone might do this, from the malicious cybercriminal hoping to secure financial details or personal information for further scams, or an enterprise offering wireless to steal your data.
It is rather difficult to identify a network which is legitimate versus one provided by a scammer and so a better strategy is to simply assume all networks have prying eyes or may be trying to manipulate your network traffic to their end. There are a number of things that can be done to prevent this:
He said that setting up your own ‘Virtual Private Network’ when accessing the internet from a public network, ensuring that apps are secure and using encryption while online.
When using a smartphone, he said that it is generally more secure to use 3G or 4G networks, as they are much more challenging to hack.
“When surfing the web, any supposedly secure web pages you look at will feature a padlock symbol in the address bar, as well as the preface ‘https’ rather than ‘http’, meaning the page is secure and not visible to others,” he said.
