Quote from limitdown:
Airports, coffee shops, universities, outside or nearby other hotspots....that's how....
ID Theft is rampant and those not reported or noticed are worse....
Sniffers are so easy to attain (Www.downloads.com) as well as unsuspecting internet users who check their bank balances at these hotspots....
Encryption is one thing, tokens and https layers within the sockets are another, however once the handshake has occurred, generally no further verification occurs and certainly not on every packet level, nor are the packets sent over government security standard encryption (multi-layer, multi-dimensional verification) standards.....
Sorry, but this is the real world with real foreign based thieves working their way through as many layers of the socket protocols as possible.
Simple has always been better...
The internet has really changed everything....
i'm not saying it's impossible, but i just haven't heard of incidents involving compromised accounts because they used a public wifi hotspot...
i'm one of those people who use wifi hotspots to access my online accounts.
i've used it at the airport, in the philippines (coffee shops), and neighborhood open AP's.
someone with a sniffer could be at any of those places, but, that's one very patient guy. you see, to listen in on a "conversation" you need to capture every packet coming and going from a computer. most of these packets are garbage. on a wifi environment, you probably only have enough bandwidth to listen-in on one connection (laptop). as you already said, the logon process (username and password) go through a secured connection (encrypted packets), so you will not be able to "sniff" those.
well, what about after the connection has been made? i suppose once you find out i'm connected to my washington mutual account, you can try to intercept the communication by pretending to be me. how? by duplicating my mac and IP address. let's say you were able to do this without any hiccups from the access point (i don't see how, but let's say you're friends with the people running the location). then what? your internet browser is not gonna be able to load the webpage where i was at, as you don't have the cookies i have on my hard drive. my hard drive is not shared and xp has a built-in FW. by the way, at this point i'm gonna be disconnected or if i try to get on again, i'll be conflicting with you and you will get disconnected and it becomes a cycle.
sniffers were good in the past for intercepting simple communication/connections such as telnet.
and remember, many of these wifi hotspots are paid-connections (secured by WEP). if the guy wants to sniff the people on that hotspot, he has to be a paying customer...
one thing i do caution when using wifi in public places, make sure your keyboard is well hidden when accessing sensitive accounts. i try to go where my back is against a wall, look up and try to see if there's any cameras pointed in my direction, then close the lid of the laptop with just enough space to type stuff.
Good luck.
During our absence from this country in July, some hackers were able to wire out funds many times to a total more than $150,000. to a Wells Fargo account that was not registered in our name. All these funds were wired out on margin and finally they also sold some of our holdings that we had for a long time. Still there is a negative cash (margin) balance that is accumulating interest everyday although e-Trade said they froze the account after they realized the fraud following many transactions each one strangely slightly below $30K. Strangely, we have never wiredout a penny from this account during its life - this did not flag them or alert them to check !!!