Knowing what to look for when you're in a coffee house connecting wirelessly to the Internet may save you from becoming the victim of someone's scam. So far this scam has been limited to airports, but there is little doubt it will soon spread to a neighborhood near you.
Michael Horowitz posted this story on the CNET News Blog yesterday afternoon, May 11, 2008. The story provides some extremely useful information for every laptop user. CNET's headquarters office, by the way, is here in San Francisco.
Here's the story:
I recently found myself in an airport terminal with a laptop and time to kill. Not knowing what the WiFi options were, I let Windows XP search for available wireless networks. As you can see below, one of the networks was called "Free Public WiFi". If this happens to you, don't connect to a network like this.
The first two networks are each labeled "Unsecured wireless network". Fine. But the Free Public WiFi network is described by Windows as an "Unsecured computer-to-computer network". As the name implies, this network connects to a computer run by a total stranger somewhere nearby in the terminal.
Read the rest of the story here
1 comments:
Here's the real story, it's a bug in Windows, nothing nefarious. Windows will advertise the last "ad-hoc" network it tried to connect to.
http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/archives/2006/09/free_public_wif.html
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