In the modern era of digitalization, the ways of stealing are also has become digital. For example: Suppose you meet your school buddy after many years, both of you go to a café and have a bite eat while deciding what to do next. Maybe you decided to go for a movie. And you connect your device to the café’s Wi-Fi hotspot and but tickets online. Soon after, you find your credit card has been sailed out.
“One should always expect unexpected”. “Danger comes from an unexpected direction”. “Walls also have ears”. Though, these saying are from years back but still works today as well. For example: while you are alert to pickpocket, criminal may be approaching invisibly, over Wi-Fi.
Now, what do you do? Find that criminal and take him to the police. I mean how you would recognize that person who stole your information.
Although, the use of credit card is not trending in Nepal, but it’s growing rapidly. All the commercial houses are being smarter every day and even you can use a credit card for online shopping.
This kind of problem is often seen the cafés and restaurants, where hackers have the strongest hotspot signal USB modem and all use his Wi-Fi. BOOM!! The hacker has all information about you. Even in big hotels, you might meet up with these type of criminals but you can’t find them.
To accomplish this kind of thievery doesn’t need any kind of high skill in programming. You can get the idea from YouTube, there are lots of video explaining how to hack Wi-Fi.
How it works:
Sniff network traffic: This simply means listening to the private conversation of others. There are lots of applications and plugins that can turn your smartphones and laptops into a sniffer. Moreover, you can get such specialized and powerful devices also.Of course, you need poorly protected network but WAP2 encrypted protocols are considered more reliable.
Fake Hotspot: Like, if you are in the hotel, which offers several free Wi-Fi, a hacker could make a hotspot very much similar to the hotels. Example: Wi-Fi 1 and Wi-Fi2 are of hotels and the hacker could make Wi-Fi 3 hotspot.
What can you do?
There are some tips you can use:
- Do not trust unprotected networks.
- Shorten your Wi-Fi list of remembered networks from time to time.
- Turn off WI-FI when you don’t need it.
- Do not use your online banking and credit card information in public Wi-Fi.
- You can use Virtual Private Network (VPN) also.
- Whenever you log-in to a website, make sure that your connection is encrypted. The URL address should start from with https.
The above points are just common ones, a really good hacker has lots of ideas to hack. For example few years back a group of hacker made a website for Nepal Investment Bank, that exactly looks like the original one. Although, the fake one was spotted quickly, think what would have happened if the users used that fake website.
Hope, this article has helped you to better understand the security problems related to the internet. Though these are just for Wi-Fi issues, there are a lot of vulnerabilities for the users on the internet. So, it would be a good idea to subscribe a trusted Antivirus.
Stay Safe!
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