Fortunately, there are ways
to protect the movements we make on the network, and
in this article, we will find enough information to understand and implement
various security methods to use in a public Wi-Fi network, and
in this way, avoid being just another number in statistics.
Basically, Wi-Fi
networks operate on public radio frequencies that can be accessed by any
device in the vicinity, and unfortunately, this condition means that the information packets that travel over
it can be easily captured by anyone who has the equipment and
the devices. Required applications.
It is for this reason that
hackers can, with relative ease, take any information they deem sensitive from virtually any public Wi-Fi hotspot
of their choice, including airports, hotels, terminals, and
other locations.
Through a series of
simple techniques and applications that most of the times are downloaded for free
and legally from the Internet, network criminals can obtain email
addresses, passwords and read
Encrypted messages and even obtain the keys of access that we use
to log into social networking sites and the like. Among them are the
following:
HTML, POP3, and
instant messaging capture: Another method used by these cybercriminals
to obtain information about what we do or where we access is the capture of
web pages, a technique that is carried out by means of software
for analyzing packets of WI-FI networks, which allows hackers
to rebuild these senseless HTML data packets into the
actual pages we have been browsing, with the consequent danger.
Although the page format is not adequate, the
important thing is that criminals have enough information to do
what they really want, and they know our browsing preferences.
The same happens with email since
when using mail servers through the POP3 protocol without encryption, a
criminal could easily obtain our access codes to the mail, in addition,
to obviously the message sent. Smart Pill
The most unfortunate thing about
all this is that you do not have to be an expert hacker or a CIA
employee to be able to spy on someone; you just have to download the appropriate applications, a
little patience and have the necessary audacity to do so. It
is so simple that we may not even realize that someone else is entering our
digital life.
Access capture to FTP servers: If we are one of the users who
still trust the FTP system to share content, we
have to be very careful when connecting through a public Wi-Fi network, especially
if the connection is not secure, since most of the times the information for
the login to these servers is sent without any type of encryption and
in plain text, which ensures that whoever wishes to
appropriate these credentials will be able to do so with 100% success.
Account hijacking: Whenever we
talk about computer security, we think that only the field of computers is affected
by this type of situation. Totally wrong. Mobile
devices such as smartphones, tablets, and notebooks can also be spied on. And
we can spy through them too, which means you don't need powerful equipment to
be able to jeopardize the safety of the unsuspecting.
In the Android
mobile operating system, there are several applications that have been
designed with the purpose of spying on our content and contacts, obviously
disguised as another type of harmless apps such as battery savers and memory
optimizers, which compile detailed reports about the logins that users make to
websites and services, and although it is not able to obtain
either the user or the password to access them, it is fed by a known
vulnerability that allows taking advantage of a session in the progress of
another user, and the consequent full access to said account.
However, great
efforts by Google to stop these problems have resulted in a significant
decrease in these types of threats.
